NEW YORK, NY.- Composer David T. Little isn’t sure whether it was really his idea to write the opera “What Belongs to You.”

Nine years ago, he was given an advance copy of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel of the same name by his friend and fellow musician Alan Pierson, from the group Alarm Will Sound. As Little read the book, a finely hewed account of desire and shame, and their resonances in an American’s dangerous love for a Bulgarian hustler, he thought: This is a song cycle waiting to happen, if not a full-length opera.

He said as much in an email to Pierson, taking the first step that led to the premiere of “What Belongs to You” on Thursday at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. Now, Little said, “I suspect Alan masterminded this thing from the beginning.”

In the years since Little was sent the book, Greenwell has become a critical darling, the author of “Cleanness” and “Small Rain,” which was released this month. Little and Pierson brought on more artists: Grammy Award-winning vocalist Karim Sulayman, for whom the opera was written; and Mark Morris, a choreographer and director, who is staging the work’s premiere.

And, yes, this is exactly what Pierson was hoping would happen.

“This is a book that I’ve been deeply connected to from the beginning,” he said. He and Greenwell, a former singer, were students and collaborators at the Eastman School of Music, and remained close friends as Greenwell became a poet, a teacher and then a prose writer, whose style seemed to reflect the different phases of his life. Pierson read early versions of “What Belongs to You,” which Greenwell dedicated to him.

At some point, Pierson told Greenwell, “Man, wouldn’t it be awesome if this thing were an opera?” And he had a composer in mind. (You can guess whom.) Pierson had worked with Little on his harrowing opera “Dog Days,” and, Pierson said, “I had a feeling that his dramatic wisdom and his attunement to emotional nuance, his ability to create different kinds of expressive energy happening simultaneously, was something that we needed.”

An early image that came to Little was Schubert’s “Winterreise,” its journey, interior storytelling and elevated expression a seeming ancestor to Greenwell’s novel. Little felt that “What Belongs to You,” like “Winterreise,” should be written for a single singer, so he began to adapt the book into a monologue-like libretto.

Greenwell’s writing is already musical, down to the rhythmic nuances of a comma or semicolon, and often has a tone at once operatic, devotional and transcendent. Sentences run long and, as Little said, “double back on themselves with revelation.” It’s text that can’t really be set on its own, but that loses its magic if reduced to mere plot.

“When you’re reading it, you can look back a few words, and that’s one of the things that’s so wonderful about reading Garth’s work,” Little said. “It becomes a very personal experience. But with opera, you can’t really do that.”

Greenwell sent him a Word document of the novel’s text, which helped Little go through and virtually rewrite it, paragraph by paragraph, preserving phrases rather than sentences. “I learned a ton about writing by really studying Garth’s style and approach,” Little said. “I had to take a chapter and distill it, but in a way that still felt like the language of the book.”

Those familiar with Little’s work, often a blend of classical music and rock, may be surprised by his “What Belongs to You” score. There are flashes of rock, but it is largely inspired by Monteverdi and Schubert, as well as John Dowland, Giovanni Valentini and Gérard Grisey, taking cues from the Renaissance through the 20th century. There is even some Britten. Little called it all “a constellation of influences” shaped by the material.

The score also nods to Sulayman’s artistry, his repertoire of songs by Schubert and the way he articulates early and Baroque music. Little elongates and ornaments syllables with a breathy, nearly silent “H”; writes directions such as “like distant Schubert”; and ends with a quote from “Der Leiermann,” the closing song of “Winterreise.”

But he renders hallmarks of Greenwell’s writing in music, too. The novel’s protagonist expresses ecstasy and pain within the same breath, and the score responds with intense juxtapositions of lyrical radiance and a hard edge. The vocal writing, similarly, demands that Sulayman shift abruptly among tones of pillowy softness, speechlike Sprechstimme and parlando, and unruliness that verges on ugliness.

At its most shocking, Little’s music calls on the instrumentalists of Alarm Will Sound to sing, acting as a chorus to embody the hustler Mitko and the protagonist’s father during two pivotal, terrifying moments.

“It’s not hard to see the connections between the father and Mitko, as object of desire and antagonist,” Pierson said. “And having the ensemble become those characters really connects those two. It’s almost like we’re not experiencing the words in a literal way. We’re not hearing the character say them; we’re hearing the ways those words have stuck in the narrator’s mind.”

Even with those choral interjections, the score is immense as a monodrama (or, as Morris called it, a melodrama). It runs about 90 minutes, and Sulayman sings almost constantly, compressing the technical demands of an opera several hours long into a breathless dash.

But, Sulayman said, he likes a challenge. And he welcomed the prospect of reuniting with Greenwell and Pierson; he, too, went to Eastman, and had met Pierson even earlier, during a summer program in high school.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tackled,” Sulayman said of the score. “I feel like it’s unlike anything that’s been written. This really runs a gamut in terms of vocal range, dynamic range, the sheer marathon aspect. The vocal undertaking is just colossal.”

The complexity of the story, he said, is similar to that of Schubert’s cycles “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise,” but “What Belongs to You” is longer, and written not for voice and piano, but voice and sinfonietta. “You’re dealing with a thicker orchestral texture,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about myself with this piece, mainly that as vocal artists we have to think of ourselves as athletes.”

Pierson has occasionally pulled Sulayman aside at rehearsals and asked him whether he was going to be OK. “No one’s done this before,” Pierson said, referring to the scale of Sulayman’s role, “and it’s kind of a singular challenge. It’s not just about pacing the opera, but also pacing the process.”

As if the physicality of the music weren’t enough, Sulayman has to manage the action of Morris’ staging. Morris, who was the last major artist to join the project, said he was initially worried about taking on the opera, because “it might be too ‘boo hoo, I’m gay.’” But he quickly found himself thrilled by the story and score.

That was in February 2020. Then, like most performing arts projects at the time, it was stalled by the pandemic. Alarm Will Sound was able to present a portion of it at the University of Missouri, where it is the resident ensemble at the Mizzou International Composers Festival, but it wasn’t until recently that Morris was able to stage “What Belongs to You” in earnest.

Morris enlisted his frequent collaborator Maile Okamura for the sets and costumes, and has been working on how to manage the jumps in time and place that lend the score both a cinematic and impressionistic feeling. “It’s hard, because I didn’t want Karim to just be sitting at a desk and singing,” Morris said. “And yet I wanted it to seem confidential. It’s not reading from a journal, but it’s remembering stuff that causes other memories to happen, and regret and shame — all the usual ‘boo hoo, I’m gay’ stuff, but in a very smart and interesting way.”

The run of “What Belongs to You” in Virginia is brief, just two performances, but with the caliber of artists involved, the opera’s team is hoping for revivals elsewhere, including in New York. (At the very least, it will be recorded for commercial release.) The work’s development has followed a strange course for an art form that usually starts with a commissioning theater; the presenter, while crucial, came instead at the end.

“This is a piece that I felt like I had to do,” Little said. “Those are pieces that are sometimes a little less secure, and they exist in a weird space of booking and resources. But in the end, they have to be what they have to be.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.