For a lad who grew up in Orange, New Jersey, listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, American composer John Harbison celebrated his 61st birthday in a big way: On today’s date in 1999, Harbison’s opera “The Great Gatsby” premiered at the Met, with its composer on hand to take a curtain call with its cast.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, a devastating evocation of America’s “Roaring 20s,” is a regular contender for the title of the “Great American Novel,” but Harbison says when he told his mother he was thinking of writing an opera based on “Gatsby,” she wasn’t very enthusiastic, arguing, in effect, that the characters in the opera were a totally unsympathetic bunch. Gatsby, the novel’s anti-hero is a both a fraud and a crook. Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love and the object of his obsessive desire, is selfish, spoiled and shallow.

But Harbison saw it differently: “Yearning and despair are very big operatic themes,” he said. “As for the character of Jay Gatsby, I like that he takes a lot of risks and is steadfast and loyal to some vision that is not realistically possible. The opera provides many opportunities to look at both sides of that, to understand to what degree he's an impostor, and to what degree his story is real, which is a big American theme in general.”

Time will tell if Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” will prove a strong contender for the title of “The Great American Opera.”