U.S. contemporary composer Philip Glass, shown in July 2008, will create an opera about Walt Disney for New York City Opera. (Peter Kollanyi/MTI/Associated Press)U.S. contemporary composer Philip Glass, shown in July 2008, will create an opera about Walt Disney for New York City Opera. (Peter Kollanyi/MTI/Associated Press)

The New York City Opera has commissioned influential composer Philip Glass to compose a new opera based on the final months of studio mogul Walt Disney.

The commission is one of the first acts by incoming general manager Gérard Mortier, currently director of the Opéra National de Paris.

Mortier has also chosen a groundbreaking 1976 opera by Glass, Einstein on the Beach, as the New York City Opera's first production in its refurbished theatre in 2009. That season will concentrate on 20th-century works.

In creating the work about Disney, Glass will be working with the story from The Perfect American by writer Peter Stephan Jungk.

Jungk, an American novelist who lives in Parist and writes in German, reimagines Disney's final months through the eyes of a fictional Austrian cartoonist who used to work for Disney in the 1940s and 1950s.

The book combines both admiration and resentment for the man who created Disney studios in an examination of the American dream.

Glass, who has composed for musical theatre, dance and film as well as for opera, has worked with literary texts to create operas out of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8.

He also created an opera from Leonard Cohen's work The Book of Longing.

The Perfect American is scheduled to be performed in the 2012-13 season and will honour Glass's 75th birthday.

City Opera also premiered Glass works such as Akhnaten and recorded his Satyagraha.

For the production of Einstein on the Beach, the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Lucinda Childs Dance company will work with City Opera.

In the 2009-10 season, City Opera's home at the Lincoln Centre is undergoing a $200-million renovation.

Mortier has scrapped traditional opera productions and scheduled performances of concerts, live music and panels spread around New York's five boroughs in an effort to woo new opera lovers.