Just about everyone knows the overture from Rossini’s 1829 grand opera “William Tell.” Even if you’ve never been to a classical concert, never mind an opera, in your life, you’ve probably heard it. If you don’t think specifically of “The Lone Ranger,” you probably think of something involving galloping horses and/or a hero charging in to save the day.
You probably don’t think of the Swiss folk hero William Tell, or any other numbers from the opera — because even as the overture has left an outsize and lasting impact in popular culture, the rest of it is a deep cut even for opera fans.
These days, “most people have not seen, sung, heard ‘William Tell,’” said Boston Lyric Opera artistic director and mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen, who got acquainted with the overture as a child. Her father would play it on the piano while she bounced on a toy horse, she said.
“Most people” no longer includes BLO’s cast and crew or four performances’ worth of audience. To launch its 50th season, BLO engaged directorial duo Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore, a cast of 11 principal singers and dozens of chorus members, and a full orchestra, for the most ambitious and largest-scale staged production the company has presented for some time.
BLO’s “Tell,” which runs at the Emerson Colonial Theatre through Oct. 4, is still nowhere near as massive as it was in the 19th century, when opera audiences expected ballet sequences, several repeats and encores, and even multiple grand finales. But even the premiere production at the Paris Opera started being cut after a few performances, said Tzykun in a phone interview. “So we’ve done the most traditional thing with the opera. We created our own cut.”
“It’s always trimmed down,” said BLO general director Bradley Vernatter. “So we wanted to do it in a way that was reflective and resonant with where we are today.”
Tzykun and Moore’s cut brings the opera’s runtime from 4½ hours to just over 2½. Gone are the ballets and the repeats and anything “that doesn’t really contribute to the plot,” Tzykun said. The opera follows the Tell legend: A Helvetian man refuses to submit to a tyrannical Allemanian noble. Noble makes man shoot apple off son’s head, man nails the shot and sparks his countrymen to overthrow tyrants, with several embellishments and side plots, including a forbidden romance between a Helvetian man and an Allemanian woman, along the way.
About those conflicting factions: the oppressed “Helvetians” are canonically Swiss, and the tyrannical “Allemanians” are intended to represent the Austrian dukes that sought to rule over their homeland. However, Tzykun — who grew up in Odesa, Ukraine, under Soviet rule — said she didn’t want to place the action in a specific location, the better to help audiences connect with what she sees as the perpetually relevant thrust behind the story. “It’s all about that line,” said Tzykun. “How much is too much, and how much can people tolerate before they decide to take a stand?”
Nelsen, who sings the role of Tell’s wife, Hedwige, in BLO’s production, said she hoped it would “feel relevant and urgent to anyone who comes into the theater,” and emphasized there would be “drama from the beginning.”
When the curtain rose at the Colonial Theatre on Friday, the galloping finale of the overture accompanied a scene of drably clad chorus members hustling on stage two by two, raising their hands over their heads to submit to inspection by Allemanian toughs with neon-blue batons before being rushed along to the opposite side of the stage, where a sharply dressed Allemanian woman selected a few of them to film what looked to be a propaganda video about their supposedly happy lives. Act 1 ended with a bloody and chillingly realistic scene of a wedding celebration interrupted by military atrocities against civilians.
Beyond the specifics of BLO’s production, “Tell” and the season more broadly is “a statement about who we are and why we’re here,” Nelsen said. “When you talk to other opera companies and say ‘We’re doing “William Tell,”’ they’re like, ‘Oh, good for you! That’s an undertaking.” Because BLO is using “everybody from our whole community to put this on,” doing “Tell” felt like a celebration to Nelsen. She pointed out the outsize role the chorus plays — “they’re on stage for 90 minutes!” — in contrast to other recent BLO mainstage productions, where the ensemble has only appeared in a few scenes.
The fact that BLO could prepare the chorus for “Tell” in the first place was thanks to the company’s Opera and Community Studios rehearsal and performance space in Fort Point, said Vernatter. Before the studios opened earlier this year, rehearsals for BLO operas were scattered around the city in whatever rooms were available.
“It would not have been feasible for us to transport this size of company — the chorus, the orchestra — across the city to all these different rehearsal rooms, and enable them to do their best work,” he said.
Now, preparation is all in-house. “We were able to start rehearsals earlier. We were able to have multiple rehearsals happening at the same time. We’ve never been able to do that.”
Those studios will be booked and busy with BLO activity galore this season. There are two more fully staged productions at the gilded Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, including André Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” directed by New Hampshire-born soprano and director Patricia Racette, who made her BLO debut as a singer in 1992’s “Tales of Hoffmann.” There are recitals. There are two collaborations with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” in concert in January, and a to-be-titled community opera in May with music by Carlos Simon and libretto by Tracy K. Smith.
“It demonstrates the full scope of what this art form is, through all our different programs,” Vernatter said.
WILLIAM TELL
Oct. 2 and 4. Emerson Colonial Theatre. www.blo.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.