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Machover, who directs the Opera of the Future group at MIT’s Media Lab, says he was drawn to the idea after he learned about the remarkable 1935 meeting of Schoenberg and MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring “The Good Earth.”

Machover’s opera begins and ends with Thalberg as a framing devise.

Picture Schoenberg, in 1935, in the office of Hollywood’s prevailing film producer, Irving Thalberg, offering untenable requirements to score MGM’s feature film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.”

Picture, again, eight decades later and 3,000 miles away, the head of the Opera of the Future project in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s ultra-futuristic Media Lab, mulling over an idea for an opera based on that remarkable Thalberg incident as a way to examine the profound implications of art and entertainment had Schoenberg been given the green light.

Tod Machover’s 2018 opera depicts the only-in-Hollywood weirdness of the composer’s encounters with studio head Irving Thalberg as they haggle over the eccentric notion of the uncompromising modernist scoring a feature film of Pearl S. Buck’s bestseller “The Good Earth,” which takes place in a Chinese village.