“It’s very close to the earth to me” Hendrick, who lives in Baton Rouge, La., said of Steinbeck’s narrative landscape in “Of Mice and Men.” Indeed, “a lot of times the power of it is not in the big emotional moments, but where nothing is going on except the two of them in the middle of the forest.”

Bass Rod Nelman and tenor Michael Hendrick are indelibly connected to George and Lennie, the pair of tragically aligned characters who define Carlisle Floyd’s opera “Of Mice and Men.”

For more than a decade, the two singers have performed these roles, sometimes separately, and elsewhere on the same stage — a process they’ll repeat when Kentucky Opera mounts its production Oct. 30 and Nov. 1 at the Brown Theatre.

Those two performances will test the mettle of both artists, amid one of the most concentrated examples of musical theater in modern American opera.

It has been more than 70 years since John Steinbeck wrote his celebrated novella, and 40 years since Floyd created his opera (to his own libretto). Yet all that time has scarcely diminished the power of Steinbeck’s original vision, in which the dreams of two wandering souls are contemplated, deferred and eventually shattered.

“I think of it more as a piece of theater that happens to be an opera,” Nelman said in a recent interview, not long after he’d driven in from his home near East Lansing, Mich. “The music adds to the drama that is already in Steinbeck’s book.”

Written during the Great Depression, “Of Mice and Men” chronicles the journey of two men drifting from job to job in search of tranquillity. All they want is to be left alone with their slice of home and hearth.

George is an able-bodied, intelligent fellow desperate to settle down. Lennie is an oak tree of a man with the mind of a child. His greatest pleasure is to pet soft things, an affection that one day will bring him doom.

They are, in many respects, creatures of the soil and dusty roads, reflecting themes that Steinbeck would soon return to in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“It’s very close to the earth to me,” Hendrick, who lives in Baton Rouge, La., said of Steinbeck’s narrative landscape in “Of Mice and Men.” Indeed, “a lot of times the power of it is not in the big emotional moments, but where nothing is going on except the two of them in the middle of the forest.”

Nelman and Hendrick first appeared together in Floyd’s opera eight years ago, singing in a production at New York City Opera just days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Separately, they’ve performed with such companies as Glimmerglass Opera, Utah Opera and Washington, D.C., Opera, testifying to how “Of Mice and Men” is among the most frequently staged 20th-century operas.

In Miami some years ago, Nelman sang subsidiary characters in a production that Floyd himself directed. “He was very into realism,” Nelman recalls, “and I think you get that from his music. It’s hard to make a Carlisle Floyd opera ‘stagey.’ Not to take anything away from directors, but in some ways the piece directs itself.”

Lennie — whom John Malkovich played memorably in the 1992 film version directed by Gary Sinise — is a character of consuming vulnerability. He meets a terrifying end, and the hurtling emotional trajectory can be tough on a singer-actor.

“When I first did it in Utah,” Hendrick recalled, “I would find myself predicting with my acting what was coming. I had to negotiate and get rid of that, and live in the moment.”

Floyd was a compositional island of romanticism in an ocean of atonality. Even so, mounting one of his works at a regional company like Kentucky Opera can be a marketing challenge.

“Maybe in the states they hesitate to do it,” Hendrick said, “because they want to appear to be doing more of the European” core repertory.

And that can be a shame. “I think this is a great piece (for) people who think opera is about standing and singing and stories that don’t make any sense,” Nelman said.

It may also be that audiences recognize something of themselves in the loving, sometimes contradictory relationship between George and Lennie.

“I find that I see examples of George and Lennie wherever I go,” Hendrick observed. “Sometimes in the human condition of being alive, I run into circumstances in other lives where we become joined up with someone else, in codependency.”

“Not only have our views about the characters changed over the years,” Nelman added, but “the great thing about redoing these roles is having input from other people.” From one performance to the next, “even though it’s the same blocking, you always approach it fresh that day, to try to live the drama as it happens.”

Reporter Andrew Adler can be reached at (502) 582-4668, or [email protected]

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