For reasons that I understand but dislike, new operas are the hardest tickets for most American companies to sell. For Washington National Opera, whose audience is largely allergic to anything outside the familiar repertory, it must be difficult to reconcile what a major American opera company should be doing — performing recent operas and commissioning new ones — with the overwhelming concern for the bottom line. All the more reason, then, to praise WNO for mounting the American premiere of Nicholas Maw’s 2002 opera, Sophie’s Choice. Let us hope that the performances will make the company enough money not to discourage further experimentation with new operas, but the number of empty seats in the Kennedy Center Opera House on Sunday afternoon, while not scandalous, was enough to make me worry. If you wish the WNO were not always producing the same old operas, you are obligated to see one of the four remaining performances.

Some readers may not be familiar with the story of Sophie’s Choice from either William Styron’s 1979 novel or Alan Pakula’s powerful 1982 film adaptation, with the flawlessly inflected and agonizingly fragile, porcelain performance of Meryl Streep in the title role, so I will not reveal all of it here, because it deserves to tell itself for the first time in all its terrible power. It is narrated by Stingo, a southern writer who moves into a boarding house and becomes entangled in the complicated love story of Nathan and Sophie, two refugees from reality whose lies Stingo patiently unravels bit by bit. He ultimately learns about Sophie’s childhood in Poland, how she survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, and the source of Nathan’s jealous and violent rages against Sophie. It is not an easy story, by any means, although Styron infuses the characters with humor in their flights of fancy.