Former Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were ideological foes and yet famously close friends. They often dined together, spent most New Year's Eves together and regularly attended operas — a shared love — at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., after arguing all day on the court. That unusual friendship inspired an opera about them: Scalia/Ginsburg, by Derrick Wang, which premiered in 2015, a year before Scalia's death and five before Ginsburg's. Given the gravity of the justices' work, one might expect the opera to be serious, but it's a buddy comedy, as the composer himself described it. It's sure to entertain when the Opera Company of Middlebury brings its comedic-opera expertise to bear in three performances of the work this weekend. Founder and artistic director Doug Anderson pairs the one-act opera with a Vermont premiere of the 17-minute curtain-raiser "The Interlopers," by Cuban-born Jorge Martín-Buján, a former Vermonter who now lives in Texas. The brief work is part of a series called Beast and Super-Beast, based on short stories by British writer Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), that premiered in the 1990s. Anderson relocates the setting of "The Interlopers," a story about a land dispute, from eastern Europe to Vermont. Wang, who is something of a polymath, earned a bachelor's in music at Harvard University and a master's at Yale before deciding to study constitutional law at the University of Maryland. While reading cases for his law degree, and particularly Scalia's famously fiery dissents, he started to "hear music," he said during a TED talk. The dissents reminded him of rage arias, a type of solo in baroque Italian operas of the 1700s. Known for her sense of humor, Ginsburg was funny just describing Scalia/Ginsburg for a live audience in New York City months before her death. "It opens with Scalia's rage aria. Scalia is locked up in a dark room. He's being punished for excessive dissenting," she said. "I then emerge through a glass ceiling to help him pass the test he needs to pass to get out of the dark room." That test is arranged by the opera's third character, the Commentator, a takeoff on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Commendatore in Don Giovanni. In fact, much of the opera refers to or even borrows from operas throughout the genre's 400-year history — Wang's nifty way of transposing the tradition of legal…