Phillip Bullock / Ressenyes

In a short program note for “The Romance of the Rose,” given its world premiere by Long Beach Opera over the weekend, the composer Kate Soper suggests that opera “is a good receptacle for the messy complexity of the human condition in general.” So is, as she notes, love. And so, to be very sure, is her endearingly messy but profoundly thought-through new opera. “The Romance of the Rose” is a riotous jumble of love-talk about — again in Soper’s words — “gender, astrology, fashion, war, law, God, the nature of language and the concept of free will.” Her starting point and obsession was the 13th century epic Old French poem “Le Roman de la Rose,” which questions the meaning of love along with everything else under a sun still thought to revolve around the Earth. Her ending point, in her own brilliantly literary libretto set to her brilliantly head-spinning mix of musical elements, is a flabbergasting commentary about a protagonist who falls head-over-heels in love with a rose. Coupled with a terrific performance by Long Beach Opera that includes more than one star turn, the dowdy Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro became the unlikely locale for a double operatic triumph. The first triumph was obviously that of Soper. For the past dozen years, she’s been writing provocative music theater that doesn’t quite fit in any genre and that certainly doesn’t align with the current fashion of go-for-the-gut, conventional-narrative modern opera. She seeks out, instead, the other places in our psyches all too easily ignored. The second triumph is for Long Beach Opera. A year ago, the company was grappling with scandal and troubling allegations, and seemingly had lost its way. What LBO was able to salvage in a truncated season proved exceptional, but not enough to forecast the future. The premiere of “The Romance of the Rose” launches the company’s first full season under Artistic Director James Darrah, who also directed the production. LBO is back, not only reinventing opera but also itself. To leave the theater dazed by a new opera — that operates on several topsy-turvy levels at once propelled by nonstop invention — is one thing. To be still processing where the humor ends and the meaning begins, even after time to reflect, is another much rarer and more valuable thing.