Composer Lembit Beecher grew up in comfort and safety in Santa Cruz, but his family’s history of privation and displacement during World War II was never far from his consciousness. His mother and grandmother, who fled Estonia in 1944, told stories about this chapter of their lives, and those stories became a family legacy.

Beecher’s opera “Sophia’s Forest,” which has its West Coast premiere with Opera Parallèle this week, is not based explicitly on any of those tales. But it was inspired by Beecher’s attempt to understand that period in his mother’s life.

“It began when I discovered a photo of my mother in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1949,” he told The Chronicle in a recent interview. “She was 7 years old, and in the picture she and her friends are holding toys — mostly teddy bears — and there’s an incredibly intense expression on their faces.

“I began to think about what that time must have been like for her, and how imagination and play must have had a role for children dealing with those circumstances.”

“Sophia’s Forest,” written with librettist Hannah Moscovitch, opens a four-performance run at Grace Cathedral on Thursday, Feb. 24. It depicts the flight of the title character and her mother from an unspecified war-torn country in the Balkans and shows Sophia at three different stages of her life, from childhood to adulthood.

The chamber score, to be conducted by Artistic Director Nicole Paiement, calls for a string quartet and percussion. But the piece’s striking innovation is the presence of a group of nine sound sculptures that Beecher controls electronically in real time during the performance. In some of them, stacked towers of wine glasses rotate while a felt armature is lowered to the rim to produce eerie crystalline tones. Others are bicycle wheels, with sticks in the spokes to produce a variety of clickety-clack sounds. They serve simultaneously as musical ornaments and design elements.

“I’m obviously not the first person to use either bicycle wheels or wine glasses in a piece of music,” Beecher said. “But it feels like there’s so much subtlety and possible variation in the sound, especially thinking of it as coming from a child’s imagination.

“So you need to imagine a bicycle wheel being an actual bike, a machine, a goblin’s wing, some fluttering piece of paper in the wind, or something in the forest. And the piece tries to build different contexts for those sounds.”

They’re imperfect musical instruments. Glasses break, as glasses tend to do, and have to be replaced. The pitches in the score are rendered only approximately. The mechanics of the control process can be balky.

That’s all part of the plan, according to Beecher.

“这就像是心灵所有的信息rmation buried in it,” he explained. “But because it’s a child’s mind, it expresses itself with an element of randomness or fragility. And I’ve tried to write that into the piece.”

Paiement and her husband, director Brian Staufenbiel, helped workshop “Sophia’s Forest” before its 2017 premiere with Opera Philadelphia. She particularly appreciates the way Beecher’s writing blurs the lines among the various performing forces, she said.

“It’s more of an art piece than a traditional opera, with the drama coming through entire soundscape. As a musician, I really appreciate that,” Paiement added. “We’ve become a visually oriented society in so many ways, and we expect dramatic action to be something we can see. This piece is not that.”

Beecher, 41, grew up near the UC Santa Cruz campus, where his father taught intellectual history. Estonian was Beecher’s first language, and his English — delivered in gentle, insinuating tones — retains a faint hint of an accent. He was drawn to music first as a pianist, then as a conductor, but the urge to tinker and create ultimately led him to composition.

The family history has informed Beecher’s writing in many ways.“These Memories May Be True,”composed in 2012 for the Del Sol Quartet (which is scheduled to perform in “Sophia’s Forest”), was a wordless evocation of his grandmother’s wartime stories. “I Have No Stories to Tell You,” a 2014 chamber opera, and “Tell Me Again” — a concerto written for Beecher’s wife, cellist Karen Ouzounian — similarly take inspiration from the hand-me-down lore of immigrant families. But Beecher has also written music based on Estonian folk songs his great-grandfather, a composer and folklorist, collected in the early years of the 20th century.

Asked about his relationship with the ancestral homeland, Beecher thought a long time before responding.

“I guess because I’m pausing so long, I should probably say it’s complicated,” he said finally, with a soft laugh. “But it doesn’t feel weighty. It just feels like there’s part of me that’s still 9 years old and celebrating the liberation of Estonia from the Soviet Union.

“Estonia is something I feel as a place of the past, and as a cultural inspiration. But as a present-tense thing, it still feels unexplored for me.”

“Sophia’s Forest”:Opera Parallèle. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 24-26. $35-$145. Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F.www.operaparallele.org