Opera is capacious enough as an art form to encompass an infinite variety of stories, from Greek mythology to the lives ofJ. Robert Oppenheimerand Malcolm X.

But Steve Jobs?

The tale of the turtleneck-clad visionary whose leadership of Apple helped remake the course of technology might seem an odd subject at first glance. The dramatic underpinning is hard to discern, and if anyone comes off as resistant to the lyrical possibilities of operatic vocal writing, it’s the famously brusque and self-controlled Jobs.

Yet “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” the 2017 work that is scheduled for an overdue San Francisco Opera premiere Friday, Sept. 22, tackles its subject with unhesitating assurance. From the virtuosic opening scene, in which Jobs gives an extended pitch for the transformative power of the newly released iPhone, through the translucent elegiac finale after he dies of pancreatic cancer, the opera maintains a double focus on both the man and his societal impact.

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The reason, according tocomposer Mason Bates, is that he and librettist Mark Campbell resisted any impulse to create something purely biographical.

“I kept saying, ‘Let’s make sure this is not just a biopic,’ ” Bates told the Chronicle by phone from his home in Burlingame. “We just wanted to make a really good opera.”

So even though the iPhone, which is referred to throughout simply as “the device,” dominates the opera’s opening, the camera soon shifts to other aspects of Jobs’ life — his troubled interactions with women, his immersion in Buddhism, and especially his complex marriage toLaurene Powell Jobs, who emerges toward the end of the opera as his savior.

The contrast between the clean reliability of tech and the unpredictability of human interactions, Bates said, is what gives “Jobs” its tension.

“Mark and I wanted the opera to move pretty quickly away from the obsession with the device and really be about this man and the people around him. The device represents the key conflict in his lives and ours,” he explained.

“You know, life is so messy. If you break up with someone over your iPhone, or say ‘I love you’ by text, all of these messages go through these ostensibly sleek, perfect devices. But human experience doesn’t have just one button.”

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“Jobs” had its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera in July 2017, and was scheduled to come to the San Francisco Opera, one of the piece’sco-commissioners, in the summer of 2020. When the time came, though, the COVID-19 shutdown had been in place for several months, and thepremiere was pushed back.

In the interim, “Jobs” has had productions in Salt Lake City and Calgary, and Bates continues to sustain a busy composing schedule. He’s currently putting the final touches on an operatic adaptation of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” thePulitzer Prize-winning novelfrom 2000 by Berkeley author Michael Chabon, in preparation for a 2024 premiere.

But seeing “Jobs” in San Francisco, he said, feels like a homecoming.

“It feels incredible to have the opera come back, not just to the place where it was written, but to the setting of the story,” Bates said. “And I’m glad to be reunited with the original team, including Kevin Newbury, the director, and the conductor Michael Christie.”

The San Francisco production includes some members of the original Santa Fe cast, including mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as Laurene and bass Wei Wu as the Zen teacher Kōbun Chino Otogawa. The title role will be sung by baritone John Moore in his company debut.

“工作”是贝茨的歌剧,他第一次task was to sell librettist Campbell on the project.

“It was not my idea to write about Steve Jobs,” said Campbell, whose lengthy catalog includes Kevin Puts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning World War I opera“Silent Night,”Paul Moravec’s adaptation of “The Shining,” and Laura Kaminsky’s trans-themed “As One.”

“I like Mason’s music a lot, and when he called me to talk about a project I thought, ‘Great,’ ” he recalled in a phone call from his home in New York. “Then he told me it was about Steve Jobs and I was just, like, ‘Oh, God. OK. Well, I’ll find my way.’ ”

Campbell’s path to the libretto ran in a variety of directions, including Walter Isaacson’s influential 2011 biography of Jobs, and especially the character of Laurene, which he expanded and deepened after the premiere. Other notable figures in the opera include Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs, and the painter and memoirist Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his daughter Lisa.

But Campbell emphasized that he didn’t interact with any of the actual subjects while writing the libretto (or afterward, for that matter).

“We wanted to do this entirely on our own. Obviously we didn’t want to do anything that could be legally problematic,” he said, noting that a reference to Microsoft in his original draft was deleted out of an abundance of caution. “But I wasn’t that scared about that. I was interested in creating an impression of these people, not the people themselves.”

At the same time, the opera takes a close look at the way technology — and the iPhone in particular — has refashioned the quality of contemporary American society.

“Steve Jobs is very much still present in our lives,” Campbell said. “I mean, he’s in our pockets! I’m here at the beach on Fire Island, and I have to actively remind myself to leave my phone behind and actually look at the ocean.”

The poignancy of the final scenes comes from the notion that Jobs, at the end of his life, perceived with a certain amount of regret just how dominant a force technology had become.

“I think the kind of success he had undid him at a certain point,” Campbell said. “He recognized that these devices could take over our lives.”

That transition from excited hucksterism to nuanced regret — the “evolution” of the opera’s two-sided title — finds a counterpart in the textures of Bates’ score, which slowly slims down to spare, evocative musical textures.

“The piece had to have this kinetic Technicolor sound, because of the energy of Steve Jobs,” Bates said. “But the challenge for me was then to be able to pull it all back to something that’s literally just Laurene with an acoustic guitar.”

If there’s a moral to be drawn from the opera, it might even be something as simple as “put your phone away” (especially, of course, during the performance).

“We know that Steve Jobs could be a tough cookie, a pretty cold guy,” said Bates. “But he was also a great lover of the arts and humanities. I don’t feel like he would want to look around any street in the city and see everybody just hunched over their devices.”

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman