It has to be the Holy Grail for any opera composer: a commission to write a full-scale work for one of the world’s major houses. Even apart from his provocative choice of subject matter, Mark Adamo is certain to get lots of attention for his latest creation for the stage when The Gospel of Mary Magdalene receives its world premiere on June 19 at San Francisco Opera. The production boasts a cast including Sasha Cooke as the title figure together with Nathan Gunn, William Burden and Maria Kanyova; Michael Christie conducts, and Kevin Newbury is the director.

Adamo determined early on that he wouldn’t squander the opportunity on a predictably ‘operatic’ story – on yet another tale of passion or vengeance that, in the end, only reaffirms stereotypes of opera as a safely predictable, escapist entertainment.

‘I didn’t want a small story that’s simply blown up on a grand scale,' says Adamo, a native of Philadelphia long based in New York. Instead, he found himself intrigued by the operatic potential of characters whose traditional story has become, in a way, too familiar: so much so that alternative ways of imagining their narrative have long been ‘hidden in plain sight’.

A thought experiment illuminated another angle from which to consider the story of Jesus. What if, rather than treat Jesus and his followers as religious or mythical icons – sexless figures who transcended ordinary human drives – they were represented as fully dimensional and emotional human beings guided by their own intuitions? And what if the tantalisingly brief appearances Mary Magdalene makes in the official gospels were enhanced by her depiction in the so-called ‘Gnostic Gospels’ so that she plays a decisive role? These writings, which were excluded from the canonical New Testament, show Mary Magdalene as a prominent disciple with a special attachment to the saviour figure. ‘The fervor of interest in the Magdalene is striking,' says Adamo. ‘There’s a pent-up suspicion that there has to be more to this character’.

Before you whisper The Da Vinci Code, the composer points out that the Dan Brown pot-boiler is a ‘glossy entertainment’ based on ‘medieval iconography’ of Mary Magdalene to concoct a fantasia about a fictional conspiracy to suppress the evidence of her importance. In contrast, Adamo was motivated to draw on primary sources (the canonical and Gnostic texts) in order to give credible dramatic and psychological dimension to figures who have been buried under two millennia of continual reinterpretation.

Fittingly, the opera is framed by a present-day group of Christian archaeologists. Adamo dramatises their longing to feel connected to a spiritual tradition which seems to have lost its resonance in the real world of human desires and fears. The archaeologists interact with the larger chorus, expressing an ‘emotional anguish’ which ends up ‘calling these biblical characters into existence on the stage’. On another level, their findings lead to an alternative reading of Jesus (Yeshua in the opera) and his relationships with his followers – in particular, Mary Magdalene – and with his mother (Miriam). The opera as a whole thus unfolds simultaneously in our time and in first-century Galilee – a fascinating challenge for the set designer, David Korins.

Adamo has already had enviable success composing opera (while also writing his own librettos). There have been dozens of productions of his debut stage work, a lyrically intimate rendering of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1998), which was followed by the Aristophanic satire of Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess (2005). Both were commissioned by Houston Grand Opera when David Gockley held the reins there, and both are scored for chamber forces. Despite this track record, though, even Adamo was surprised when Gockley embraced his proposal for The Gospel of Mary Magdalene at San Francisco Opera, given the controversial nature of the subject matter. ‘I’d expected him to file it away in the folder labelled “Hell: Snowball in”,’ he jests.

At 50, Adamo is still a few years younger than his husband John Corigliano was in 1991, when the lights at the Met went down for the opening of Corigliano’s first opera, The Ghosts of Versailles. And even though Gospel is his initial foray into the realm of grand opera, Adamo’s sensibility is firmly rooted in writing for the voice (he recently finished a piece for Thomas Hampson and string quartet – Aristotle, a setting of a poem by Billy Collins). He also commands genuine theatrical savvy, as seen in his masterful libretto for Gospel, with its well-judged balance between moments of private revelation and public interaction.

The reason Adamo believes this story couldn’t have been conveyed as effectively in a chamber setting underlies the emotional complexity of his treatment. He points out that, particularly in Kevin Newbury’s staging, ‘you see not only the story, but the need for, and the process of, contemporary reinterpretation’. The archeologists are ‘modern onlookers’ who face an ‘existential challenge’ as they attempt ‘to reconstruct and rethink a story so close to them’.

Gospel moreover seems to be tapping into a larger hunger to explore the fundamental humanity of these figures through the lens of art. Two other recent examples that might be mentioned are John Adams’s latest oratorio and collaboration with Peter Sellars, The Gospel According to the Other Mary  – which presents an utterly different treatment of the Mary Magdalene figure and her relationship to Jesus – and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary.

Adamo finds several possible explanations for this phenomenon: ‘We’ve been living through 60 years of dramatic transformation in our views of sexuality in the United States, up to the current debate on marriage equality. The antagonist in any progressive debate about sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular is, inevitably, religious orthodoxy. And 9/11 imparted particular urgency to the question of how seriously we take our religious narratives and what use can or should be made of them’.

He adds: ‘That’s why I think so many of us want to go back to the source, as it were: to use figures like Mary Magdalene – who  for centuries has been made to carry the  twin burdens of incarnation and spiritual longing – to ask the questions of these religious figures to which, as moderns, we still need answers’.

Mark Adamo’s new opera The Gospel of Mary Magdalene opens at San Francisco Opera on Wednesday, June 19 and runs until July 7, 2013.