Here’s what’s new onstage at Arizona Opera for 2020-21

After scoring a huge hit with a bilingual mariachi opera in 2014, Arizona Opera has signed on to co-produce a world-premiere prequel.

“El Milagro del Recuerdo” (“The Miracle of Memory”) debuts Dec. 5 at Houston Grand Opera, the lead commissioner, before coming to Phoenix and Tucson as part of the 2020-21 season, which was announced on Nov. 7.

Composer Javier Martinez has picked up the thread from his father, José “Pepe” Martínez, who died in 2016. Jose wrote the music for “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna,” also developed in Houston and billed as the world’s first mariachi opera.

“Cruzar” (whose title translates as “To Cross the Face of the Moon”) was a success at Phoenix’s Symphony Hall, but “Milagro” will be part of the opera’s Red Series, spotlighting contemporary chamber operas in more intimate venues.

“Twenty percent of the audience for Red shows are

people who are new to Arizona Opera,” said Joseph Specter, general director for three years.

Next season, “Carmen” and “The Elixir of Love” will feature traditional, period-appropriate stagings, Specter said. No newfangled concepts.

“We feel it’s very important when we produce these beloved traditional pieces, especially in the context of a season that has so much newer material, to really honor the tradition of those older pieces,” he said.

“The Copper Queen,” by composer Clint Borzoni and librettist John de los Santos and based on a Bisbee ghost story, is a world premiere.

It was the winning entry in a contest sponsored by Arizona Spark, a group of opera patrons who wanted help nurture new work. That led to a workshop performance in 2016, then another in New York, before the company committed to a full commission.

“We will have an all-female stage director and conductor/designer team,” Specter said. “The story has two leading women separated in time by a hundred years, one in 2010 and one in 1910, and we thought because the piece was written by two men, it was all the more important that we had a strong female voice in the way it was presented artistically.”