The Paris Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, Lincoln Center . . . Lowell House?

At first glance, Lowell House may seem out of place in this stellar company, but, in fact, the Lowell House Opera, founded in 1938, is the longest continually running opera company in New England.

Its claim to superstar ranking may have received a boost last night (Wednesday, March 10) with the world premiere of an original operatic work, Yossele Solovey, by composer Noam Elkies, professor of mathematics, and librettist Jeremy Dauber '95, who is currently a Rhodes Scholar studying Jewish and Yiddish literature at Oxford University.

The black-tie premiere kicks off the latest in a long series of annual performances that have included many famous operatic works. Yossele Solovey is the company's 61st production.

The opera is based on an 1889 novel by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories of Tevye the milkman formed the basis of the musical comedy Fiddler on the Roof. Elkies described his opera's plot as "the meteoric rise and tragic demise of a wunderkind cantor in 19th-century Eastern Europe."

The work had its inception when William Bossert, the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, and then-Master of Lowell House, asked Elkies if he would write an original opera.

"Naturally, the prospect was enticing," Elkies said. "But I lacked a libretto. At some point, Jeremy and I got to talking about it, and he mentioned some Sholem Aleichem novels he had been reading for his academic work, and I asked whether any would be suitable for opera. Soon afterward he came up with the idea of a libretto based on Yossele Solovey, and the ball started rolling."

Dauber wrote the libretto first, but setting it to music involved extensive collaboration, often by phone or e-mail when the two could not meet in person. The entire process took about two years, but Elkies composed about 75 percent of the music between mid- September 1998 and mid-January 1999, a task that ate up every bit of his spare time.

"An opera performance is a great, collaborative project. I have been fortunate to work on this opera with wonderful collaborators and excellent singer-actors and orchestral musicians. I was present at almost all the rehearsals as rehearsal pianist. That and the anxiety about meeting deadlines, working around singers who had become ill, and similar crises du jour, made for a very exhausting two months," Elkies said.

Elkies, who, in 1993, became the youngest faculty member ever granted tenure at Harvard, is far from being a novice composer. A musical as well as a mathematical prodigy, he has been composing music since the age of 3 and has had his works performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and on the BBC. At Harvard, he has composed music for the Glee Club, the Collegium Musicum, and the Radcliffe Choral Society. Yossele Solovey is Elkies' first opera and his first work for the stage.

"I suppose the fact that the novel revolves around a musical child prodigy accounts for some of its appeal to me," he said. "But there are more specific things that excited me about this particular story. Sholem Aleichem was a great lover of music himself, and made music an integral part of the plot. This gave me lots of specific musical ideas to build on and suggested specific ideas for musical contrasts, characterization, and development. And of course it is a story set in a specific culture which both Jeremy and I have considerable affection for, and which has been practically absent from the world of opera."

In addition to Elkies, the cast and crew includes many with Harvard connections. The stage director is Dax Kiger, a master's candidate at the American Repertory Theatre; the musical director is Joel Bard, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and conductor of the Greater Boston Youth Symphonies Repertory Orchestra; and the singers include students from Harvard, Boston University, and other local institutions.

Performances will take place at Lowell House, Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, on March 12, 14, 17, and 21. Curtain time is 8:00 p.m. Tickets are available from Sanders Theatre Box Office, (617) 496-2222, and from BosTix at Harvard.