New York City Opera has commissioned American composer Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain," the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx that became the basis for a 2005 movie that won three Academy Awards.

The opera is slated to premiere in the spring of 2013.

This would mark Pulitzer-winning composer Wuorinen's second world premiere at City Opera. He also composed "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," based on Salman Rushdie's novel which opened in 2004.

City Opera general manager-designate Gerald Mortier, whose appointment was announced last year, commissioned the work, signalling his intention to breathe fresh life into the New York cultural institution.

Mortier has built an international reputation for innovative productions at the Salzburg Festival in the 1990s and more recently Paris Opera. He starts his first season at City Opera in September 2009.

"Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story, I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerald Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so," Wuorinen, 70, said in a statement.

"Brokeback Mountain" was the first major movie with a homosexual couple at its core. It chronicles a 25-year relationship between two cowboys, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger who met and fall in love on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963.

- CNA/jk