Two opera stars and a Broadway Tony winner bring a world premiere to Philly. It’s about the value of life.

The Hours — whether the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel or the Oscar-winning film — would seem to have enough plot lines to populate three operas.

Instead, the world premiere opera by Kevin Puts, arriving at the Kimmel Cultural Campus March 18 and 20, juxtaposes three stories in a counterpoint that confronts profound issues — the value of life, for one — encompassed by the biography of legendary English novelist Virginia Woolf, a suicidal postwar housewife in Los Angeles and a 1990s New York City AIDS caregiver.

Performances of The Hours by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin are an unstaged preview of sorts for a full staging next season by the Metropolitan Opera — the first in what promises to be a continuing joint arrangement between the two institutions.

Composer Puts, now 50, is best known for the Pulitzer-winning Silent Night, librettist Greg Pierce hails from off-Broadway theater, while the cast has mainstream opera stars Renee Fleming and Jennifer Johnson Cano plus Kelli O’Hara, star of numerous Broadway hits and a 2015 Tony winner for The King and I.

Has there ever been a lineup like this in a new opera?

Fleming, who has sung at least 60 opera roles in the world’s greatest houses, can’t quite put her finger on what draws her to playing the modern-day Clarissa, a woman fighting to maintain normality as her day crumbles hour by hour. But it’s such a close fit, she jokes that she is typecasting herself.

O’Hara feels similarly destined playing the depressive Los Angeles housewife, even though her stage savvy will be tested by stage directions that seem too intimate for opera, such as “Laura looks at her family. Who are these strangers?”

“When you can’t put words to thoughts and feelings … that’s why we musicalize things,” she said. “It’s much easier to pour out those big Greek mythology feelings. But a mother who is considering suicide while trying to make a [birthday] cake … that’s much harder.”

The greatest emotional weight perhaps falls on Cano. In a role that will be sung at the Met by Joyce DiDonato, Cano plays Woolf (1882-1941) during the writing of her novel Mrs. Dalloway, whose everyday activities become a downward psychological spiral that sets the tone for other stories in The Hours. And that includes Woolf’s own demise years later, when she filled her pockets with stones and walked into a rushing river. “She just sort of disappeared,” said Cano. “It’s lacking big opera histrionics but with more compassionate, simpler humanity,”

And a deeper one. Librettist Pierce and composer Puts created an ever-present chorus that illuminates what characters are thinking and feeling in addition to what they are singing. Then there’s the rich textures of the orchestra — a Puts specialty. Though short-ish by operatic standards (two hours, 20 minutes), the full orchestral score has 612 densely-packed pages. The character count is 19, some speaking, some singing, some dancing.

The music is full of clock imagery, whether chimes or an underlying sense of pulse. But within that pulse, the composer uses time-bending triplets that pack three beats into a two. Tinier increments create subliminal tension, such as seven notes packed into five beats. It’s a nervous score.

“There have been heavy dark times writing it. Was it the pandemic? No. It’s because … I got up at 5 a.m. to work on this thing and felt similar things to these characters,” said Puts over lunch in New York. “I’ve also felt trapped and hopeless.”

His choice of subject matter has never been easy: Opera Philadelphia has presented his Silent Night, about a World War I cease fire on Christmas Eve (2013) and the Jack-the-Ripper-era murder mystery Elizabeth Cree (2017). More recently, he worked with New York City’s Music Kitchen, setting to music words written by homeless people.

The Hours is his highest-profile work yet, a co-commission by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera. The partnership evolved at what the orchestra’s president Matías Tarnopolsky describes as “an inspiring lunch” in August 2018 with Nezet-Seguin and Met chief Peter Gelb: New works slated for the Met, but first heard in concert in Philadelphia, will also include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by composer Mason Bates and librettist Gene Scheer.

The high-powered Met/Philadelphia collaboration, though, seemed to be little help at the inception of The Hours. Obtaining the rights to Michael Cunningham’s novel and the Paramount Pictures film looked impossibly complicated.

But the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel that featured Fleming was coproduced by Scott Rudin, who also coproduced the film and cut through the legal thickets. Artistically, the transition from page to screen to stage was obvious to Fleming: “There’s this whole `magic realism’ [in the book] that works great in opera.”

Indeed, Woolf almost seems to dictate the future, writing her novel Mrs. Dalloway while later generations read it. Librettist Pierce recognized how opera could tell those stories simultaneously — augmented by details that went well beyond Cunningham’s and Woolf’s novel. Through Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, he discovered her “anxiety that accompanies creation” in unfiltered form.

Questions are likely to arise around how much male authors can truly probe the female psyche. As the Virginia Woolf surrogate, Cano feels gender is of secondary relevance to “the overarching point that this is a matter of common humanity.”

“The struggle to get through the day and make it hour by hour … we’ve all had those days,” said Cano, “and days when we’re alone and feel like we can’t relate to anyone … They [the authors] got that.”

And then some, thanks to 21st-century hindsight.

Fleming wrestled with why her lesbian character experiences endless remorse from losing her teenage romance with a male writer who is later stricken with AIDS. “They’re both gay. But now we’re in a time of much more open borders in terms of all kinds of identification,” Fleming said. “Young people could come to this and say ‘Of course she regrets it.’”

The world was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic when the novel first arrived in 1998. Now, that part of story stands to be more objectively understood — when told by a generation of artists that knows that epidemic from a distance. “We do these things in art because they’re cathartic,” said O’Hara. “Sometimes while we’re in it, the pain is too great; we’re living the story. But when we feel the story might be forgotten, we go back — in case people didn’t hear it at the time.”

‘The Hours’ will be performed at 8 p.m. March 18 and 2 p.m. March 20 at Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Cultural Campus. Tickets: $44 to $165. Information: www.philorch.org or 215-893-1999.