ANN ARBOR, Michigan — On this brochure-ready autumn day on the University of Michigan campus, students Danielle Casós, Jennie Rupp and Angela Bonello are finding new music in familiar words. The three singers, enrolled in the university’s prestigious School of Music, Theater & Dance, are acting out an excerpt from Sandra Cisneros’ 1984 novel “The House on Mango Street” for a mid-October masterclass. Casós, Rupp and Bonello — all Gen Z — probably grew up reading the scene in school: Two scampish sisters bug Esperanza, the new girl in their predominantly Latino neighborhood, for some money to buy a used bike. This time, Cisneros’ words don’t just leap off the page. They zing, the sisters harmonizing in bright thirds. They oompah, like a classic Tejano tune. When the kids’ bike sets off, they even wobble along lopsided. When the singers finish, composer Derek Bermel offers a few notes from the side of the recital hall stage. At one point, a soft, girlish voice pipes up next to him. “Can I say something?” The singers unravel into disbelieving giggles. “Of course!” Claro que sí, because the asker is… Sandra Cisneros. In a rare case of an author adapting her own work for the stage, Cisneros is the librettist of this piece: a bilingual “House on Mango Street” opera. The night before, student singers and the University of Michigan’s Philharmonia Orchestra had given the opera’s first complete, unstaged performance at the university’s historic Hill Auditorium. Its official premiere will be July 2025, at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. “There’s so much self-doubt when you come into a world distant from your upbringing. You feel you don’t belong,” Cisneros told the Tribune in an interview before the masterclass. “To have Derek launch me into this new genre has been such a gift for me because I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.” Distant, maybe, but not necessarily unfamiliar. The Chicago-born writer and poet, who turns 70 this year, lovingly recalls family trips to the Grant Park Music Festival and her mother’s passion for opera. Her memories of the latter made it into “Mango Street”: She borrows opera records from the public library and sings with velvety lungs powerful as morning glories. Today while cooking oatmeal she is Madame Butterfly until she sighs and points the wooden spoon at me. I could’ve been somebody, you know? Esperanza, you go to school. Study hard. That Madame Butterfly was a fool. “A lot of working-class people love opera,” Cisneros says. “People don’t realize that.” And a lot of people, across class, race and creed, love “Mango Street.” Bermel is among them. It was here at the University of Michigan that Bermel, then a graduate student, first learned about Cisneros’ novel. His friend, the writer and essayist Wendy S. Walters, had been in Cisneros’ guest seminar the semester before and pushed a copy into his hands. “It just stayed in my head,” Bermel says. Poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros signs books before an event at National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture on Oct. 23, 2024. Cisneros is collaborating on an opera-adaptation of “The House on Mango Street.” (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune) That was in 1991. A Random House imprint had picked up “The House on Mango Street” just a few months before. The Cisneros who came to Ann Arbor — depressed and sweating under a new deadline, for “Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” — could never have imagined her youthful work becoming a global phenomenon. “The book was not an overnight success,” she says. “I think that happens a lot with pieces of art. We’re planting seeds, and we may not see the harvest in our lifetime.” If that’s the case, the “Mango Street” opera will have been sprouting, steadily, for about eight years by the time it hits the Glimmerglass stage next summer. Bermel first reached out to Cisneros in 2017, seeking her blessing for a song cycle inspired by the book. (“I got burned once with Sylvia Plath,” he says dryly.) Before responding, Cisneros listened to Bermel’s music one day while idling in her kitchen. She found herself overwhelmed. “I don’t know this person, but I know him through his art,” Cisneros remembers thinking. After he completed his “Mango Suite,” Bermel offered to play excerpts for Cisneros in person. They agreed to meet in San Antonio along with a small audience of Cisneros’ friends. “Which is actually not very smart,” Bermel hastens to add. “Because once you go play the writer the songs, they could be like, ‘Eww, I hate this —’” “I didn’t think so!” Cisneros objects. “To me, to hear my words with music is logical, because as a poet, I’m already creating music, without music. He picked up the lines that were the most lyrical.” Bermel and Cisneros soon decided to expand the suite into an entire opera, despite lacking any formal commission from an opera company. It wasn’t a “front-burner” project for either artist until the pandemic, and even then, the process was slow going. At first, the two tried to turn each chapter into a song. That didn’t work. They also tried to match the book’s jigsaw-esque tableau by faithfully including every single character. That, too, proved too unwieldy. “In the book, there are many journeys. In the opera, there can really only be one main journey, because you’re already asking a lot of the audience,” Bermel says. Where “House on Mango Street” the book offers a collection of vignettes, “House on Mango Street” the opera threads a narrative through-line through all of them. (The music supports that reading by flowing continuously, only occasionally coming to a standstill between arias and scenes.) Cisneros and Bermel consolidated some characters and more clearly centered Esperanza as the protagonist. The “Mango Street” opera also tucks away an Easter egg from Cisneros’ latest novel, “Los fieles difuntos” (“The Faithful Departed”). The protagonist of that forthcoming book is Squinky, one of two boys who — it’s strongly implied — sexually assault Esperanza at a carnival. In the “Mango Street” opera, Squinky and his accomplice also steal Esperanza’s journal, sneeringly reading back her writing. While they do, the orchestra distorts a melody from an earlier aria, in which Esperanza sings about her romantic daydreams. “(Squinky) wants to leave Chicago because he wants to forget that. He needs to forget that,” Cisneros says. “Sometimes we think we can forget if we leave the city where it happened. But the city follows you.” "The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)Show Caption1 of 10"The House on Mango Street — An Opera in Two Acts" in a workshop perfomance, presented by SMTD OperaLab with students from the University of Michigan Department of Voice and Opera and the University Philharmonia Orchestra, in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Oct. 17, 2024. (Brenda Ahearn)Expand Just like its source material, “The House on Mango Street” opera can be shattering. The death of an undocumented man, depicted in “Geraldo No Last Name,” is reimagined as a shooting ending the first act. A character’s relationship with her abusive father is represented frankly onstage. As Cisneros has said before, the scenarios in “Mango Street” are drawn from the lives of her students, back when she was a schoolteacher in Pilsen. “I wrote about them because they broke my heart. I think that’s the key to creating anything powerful. It has to come from an open heart, from the broken heart,” Cisneros says. But — also like the book — the opera’s inconsolable grief tends to be flanked on all sides by tenderness and levity. Clarinets yowl in “Cathy, Queen of Cats,” a quirky aria about a neighbor whose home is overrun by felines. Strings scrub away with their bows when Esperanza’s mother cleans the Mango Street house’s creaky stairs. Salsa blares at the neighborhood’s sweltering summer block party. There’s also a bout of conspicuously retro hip hop, not unlike what young Esperanza might have really heard on streetcorners in the mid-1980s. “Nothing that Sandra writes is like a traditional libretto. It’s not smoothed over; it’s not anodyne. It’s got all kinds of spiky moments in it. As a composer, you have to ride those bumps, and you have to revel in them,” Bermel says. Or, as Cisneros puts it: “I write a tree, and he takes the branches he needs for that beautiful wreath.” That wreath may still be pruned and preened before its premiere at Glimmerglass. Several partner institutions have already helped hone the opera over the years, from the Houston-based chamber orchestra ROCO to student groups at Princeton University and Hunter College. Workshops of the opera date back as early as 2022, for that year’s convening of the Chautauqua Institution. (They were postponed when author Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage during that year’s festivities.) More recently, a local reading and performance scheduled for Oct. 22 at Northwestern University was canceled at the last minute due to a campus power outage. And after Glimmerglass, who knows? Cisneros is hoping the “Mango Street” opera will secure a staging in Chicago, for starters, and in other cities with large Latino populations. She also wants to adapt an hourlong version of the opera for children, “because children love the book, too.” But for now, it is enough to have the opera seen and heard, 40 years after “Mango Street’s” first edition. After the Michigan performance in October, an old friend of Cisneros texted her in awe. “She said she could see the old Sandra, the one who wrote the book,” Cisneros says, smiling, “and the new Sandra, connected like the two Fridas.” Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic. “The House on Mango Street” is coming July 18-Aug. 16, 2025, at the Glimmerglass Festival, 7300 State Highway 80, Cooperstown, New York. Tickets on sale Jan. 27; more information at glimmerglass.org