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New York City Opera has commissioned a new opera about Walt Disney, to be staged as part of the 2012-2013 season, according to Variety.

It will be written by Philip Glass and based on Peter Stephan Jungk's German-language novel The Perfect American, which imagines the last months of Disney as seen through the eyes of a fictional Austrian cartoonist who worked for him. The piece will be staged in collaboration with the British theater company Improbable.

City Opera will present a new staging of Glass and Robert Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach as part of the 2009-2010 season, under new artistic director Gerard Mortier. His many other works include Satyagraha, Metamorphosis, and Akhnaten.