Palm Beach Opera’s poster for “Enemies.”

Last week, Florida Grand Opera announced it would be performing a Holocaust-themed opera next season.

But next week, another local opera company is stepping into the subject of the Holocaust with a world premiere work for the stage. On Feb. 20, Palm Beach Opera will give the first performance of Enemies, a Love Story, an opera by the American composer and painter Ben Moore.

Moore’s opera, based on a novel by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (who lived his last years in Miami Beach and died here in 1991), is the first world premiere to be presented in the Palm Beach Opera’s 54-year history. It takes place in New York in 1948, where the Holocaust survivor Herman Broder, a ghostwriter for a rabbi, lives with his wife Yadwiga, a Polish Christian who hid him on her family’s farm during the war.

He has married her out of gratitude, but he also is carrying on a passionate affair with another Holocaust survivor, a tempestuous woman named Masha who wants Herman to marry her. If that weren’t complicated enough, soon Herman discovers that Tamara, the wife he thought had been killed in the war along with their two children, has in fact survived and is living in New York.

The story of Enemies is the story of how Herman juggles these three women, and in a larger sense, how their experience of the Holocaust has affected them all.

Ben Moore.

Palm Beach Opera has assembled a strong young cast, including Daniel Okulitch (Herman), Caitlin Lynch (Yadwiga), Leann Sandel-Pantaleo (Tamara) and Danielle Pastin (Masha). The opera is being directed by Sam Helfrich and conducted by David Stern; Allen Moyer is in charge of set design and Kaye Voyce has done the costumes.

Moore is well-known in cabaret and classical circles for his songs, and Palm Beach Opera General Director Daniel Biaggi told me Moore’s experience as a songwriter has paid off in his operatic music because he knows what works vocally and what doesn’t.

Moore’s music is melodic and tonal, two things that opera ran away from after the death of Puccini in 1924, though some writers — Gian Carlo-Menotti, Carlisle Floyd, among others — followed the more traditional path, and certainly Richard Strauss continued composing in his post-Rosenkavalier style until his death in 1949. But in general, easily accessible music for the stage has been the province of the American musical, not opera.

But Moore’s work is different; a look at the vocal score shows that the work’s melodies are central to its shape, rather than simply being tacked on as they might be in a musical. Moore naturally writes tunefully, and there are abundant passages of memorable and heartfelt melody throughout the piece.

The libretto was derived from Singer’s novel by the New York-based scholar of theater Nahma Sandrow, and she has constructed a believable, taut drama out of it (the book was made into a movie by Paul Mazursky in 1989). Moore told me the ambiguity of the story’s characters intrigued him.

“I wouldn’t have chosen something with a Holocaust theme per se, but this story wasn’t set in the concentration camps, it’s about the aftermath, the legacy of the Holocaust,” he said. “That appealed to me, and the way that Singer tells the story with humor appealed to me. These characters are very unpredictable and complex, and that was also something I was interested in. The last thing I wanted to do was write an opera that seemed to have an obvious outcome, or that what the characters were about was black-and-white.”

Good material for opera, in other words, and there is international interest in this world premiere, with major media outlets covering it, including The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, not to mention opera producers from all over the globe who will be in South Florida next week to see how it turned out.

It’s a big coup for Palm Beach Opera, and if the opera turns out to have legs, it will have secured a notable place in American artistic history as the place where this work first saw the light.

Enemies, A Love Story has its world premiere at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 20, at the Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. It will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 21, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 22. For tickets or more information, call 561-833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.