In Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1999, Virginia Woolf’s life and those of two women of later generations intermesh through the pages of Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. In 2002, with the help of the playwright David Hare and the composer Philip Glass, the director Stephen Daldry converted the material into a much-decorated movie. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar as Best Actress for her portrayal of the suicidal Woolf, a role to be assumed in Kevin Puts’s new opera by Joyce DiDonato. Renée Fleming spells Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary hostess planning a party for a poet dying of AIDS. Kelli O’Hara takes up the mantle of Julianne Moore as Laura Brown, the depressed and dutiful birthday-cake-baking wife of a W.W. II vet. —Matthew Gurewitsch