Saint François

In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”

“Stranger Love” recalls two other operas that sustain a time-suspending tone of meditative ecstasy for many hours, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise.”

There, they collaborated with opera and theater director Peter Sellars on his staging of Olivier Messiaen’s opera “Saint François d’Assise.”

He had some significant opera credits, including leading the premiere of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” at the Paris Opera in 1983, but was hardly famed for his theatrical work.

Ditto Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise,” a late-20th-century classic still unheard in this city.