Composing the great American opera and finding Melville’s great white whale turn out to be equally daunting challenges, as the Civic Theatre audience learned Saturday (Feb. 18) at San Diego Opera’s West Coast premiere of Jake Heggie’s MOBY-DICK.

Since the 1950s, the popularity of opera has risen significantly in the U.S., and American opera buffs have yearned for operas written by American composers. They are eager for stories that relate to their own tradition, rather than dredging up some historical political fracas in Spain or Italy or musing on the comic antics of quaint Swiss villagers.

In the 1980s, the late General Director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Ardis Krainik, launched a ten-year project to foster new American opera, a noble (and well-funded) endeavor that did little to increase the slender catalogue of successful American operas.

Krainik’s biggest turkey was a commission awarded to the highly respected William Bolcom to turn Frank Norris’ 1899 pulp novel about the American west, “McTeague,” into grand opera, a production directed by Robert Altman, no less. Premiered during the 1992 convention of North American music critics in Chicago, a deliciously fate-tempting stategy, Bolcom’s piece proved a lumbering disaster. No one has touched it since.

At Saturday’s MOBY-DICK performance, I kept thinking of Bolcom’s unfortunate opera because tenor Ben Heppner, who sang the title character in McTEAGUE, was singing Captain Ahab, the central non-acquatic character of Heggie’s new opera. And he was encountering significant vocal distress, finding the high tessitura Heggie chose for Ahab a constant challenge that drained the color and strength from his voice.

Late Sunday, San Diego Opera announced that due to illness, Heppner would not sing Tuesday’s (Feb. 21) MOBY-DICK performance and that he would be replaced by the young American tenor Jay Hunter Morris, who was originally contracted to sing this role for San Diego Opera, but was released from that obligation when he was asked to fill in as Siegfried in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent productions of Wagner’s SIEGFRIED and GÖTTERDÄMERUNG.

Fortunately, Morris had sung Captain Ahab last fall in the Australian premiere of MOBY-DICK, so he was prepared to step into the San Diego production, which I saw again on Tuesday. His effect on the production was nothing less than miraculous.

His astonishing vocal command of the role and the depth of character he found in the troubled Ahab restored the opera’s essential dramatic tension, a vital aspect that Heppner’s performance seriously shortchanged. The fiery brilliance of Morris’ resplendent upper range captured both Ahab’s inner strength and demonic possession, which Heggie has written in near-Wagnerian proportion. Yet Morris supplied ample nuance in Ahab’s smaller gestures, allowing some essential vestige of his humanity to be seen.

The company has announced that Morris will sing Captain Ahab through the run of the opera, which ends Sunday, Feb. 26.

Much of MOBY-DICK’s success is the eye-popping production with its steeply raked, semi-abstract set (designed by Robert Brilll) and striking CGI projections (imagined by Elaine J. McCarthy.)

Contrary to the oft-repeated musical theatre maxim, this audience DID leave humming the scenery! With these ingenious projections against the sloping back of the set, the Pequod’s crew could scale the rigging or launch from the ship into smaller whaleboats, truly magical stagecraft deftly coupled with Donald Holder’s dramatic lighting that conjured fericious gales with startling realism.

When it comes to composing persuasive or poignant vocal lines, Heggie is the star pupil. His powerful soliloquies and duos brought depth and conviction to the drama, notably Starbuck’s agonized, soul-searching decision not to kill the half-mad Captain Ahab to save the himself and the rest of the crew and an ebullient duet late in the opera when Starbuck and Ahab appear to agree that it is time to return home after a year of fruitless searching for the great white whale.

In fact, I dare say that even John Adams could take a lesson from Heggie in crafting compelling turns for the voice. But where Heggie’s score comes up short is the opera’s orchestral foundation and the more complex vocal ensembles, a shortcoming I recall from attending his first opera, San Francisco Opera’s production of DEAD MAN WALKING.

In MOBY-DICK, Heggie’s orchestral textures lack density and that big-picture drive that keeps an opera’s momentum going even when the onstage action is calm. Think of those powerful passacaglias in Britten’s scores or the thematic layering that undergirds those those of Prokofiev and Janacek. By the middle of the opera’s second half, we had heard most of what the composer had to say in the pit. In this arena of composition, Heggie could take a lesson from Adams.

No shipboard drama could go without hearty choruses for the men, and Heggie penned a soaring paean to the crew’s unity of purpose in the penultimate scene. Other choral ensembles sounded static and underwritten, especially those in the opening scenes and that awkward sea chantey that opened the opera’s second half.

Baritone Morgan Smith’s powerful and vocally opulent portrayal of Starbuck made the opera for me on Saturday, but when joined by Morris as Ahab on Tuesday, his Starbuck came into even clearer focus. These two remarkable singers played off each other’s strengths, and their chemistry raised my estimation of the work’s dramatic cogency. Not surprisingly, Smith created this role for the opera’s world premiere in 2010 for Dallas Opera, and his connection with the audience as he unfolded Starbuck’s psychologically complex persona was riveting.

Soprano Talise Trevigne traversed with ease and vocal stamina the vocal complexities of the young cabin boy Pip, although her physical and emotional characterization did not strike me as particularly congruent. As Greenhorn, the character through whom much of the story is interpreted, tenor Jonathan Boyd moved gracefully from abject naiveté to a kind of spiritual enlightenment just as his vocal sonority became richer and gained focus as the opera progressed.

New Zealand-born Samoan bass Jonathan Lemalu proved tailor made for Queequeg, his dark but penetrating bass denoting the gravity and centerness of the crew’s shaman outsider, and he demonstrated particular sensitivity to prevent Queequeg from slipping into the cliché of the noble savage.

Although the role of Captain Gardiner of the Rachel, a ship that approaches the Pequod, is not large, Malcolm Mackenzie applied his generous and hearty baritone to this role with salutary effect. Other cameos were handled cogently by Kenneth Anderson as Daggo, Robert Orth as Stubb and James Schindler as the Spanish Sailor.

You know that a production is unusually demanding when its staff includes not only a choreographer, Keturah Stickann, but a fight director, James Newcomb, and an Acrobatic Coordinator, Fletcher Ryan. This trio kept a large cast and ample chorus inventively (and safely) synchronized even in the most complex dramatic feats.

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