BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Feb. 25 — Aaron Copland wanted to make it an opera. So did Leonard Bernstein. But Thornton Wilder, the author of "Our Town," turned both composers down. Now, 68 years after it was written and 30 years after Wilder's death, the play has made it to the opera stage. "Our Town," with music by Ned Rorem and a libretto by J. D. McClatchy, received its premiere here on Friday evening by the Indiana University Opera Theater, one of six commissioners of this opera.

Mr. Rorem, 82, is in his own way an American master, and certainly a specialist in vocal music, with more than 500 songs; but he has written only one other evening-length opera, "Miss Julie," in 1965. The impetus for "Our Town" came from Mr. McClatchy, a friend of Tappan Wilder, the playwright's nephew and literary executor.

In remarks before the premiere, Mr. Wilder explained the Wilder estate's decision to go against the playwright's wishes: in effect, he suggested, the play is so well established that it can sustain all kinds of interpretations. Indeed, there had been talk of a Broadway musical, but Mr. McClatchy convinced Mr. Wilder that opera would make a better fit. Then he persuaded Mr. Rorem to write it.

The question remained whether Mr. Rorem was a good fit. He was, it turns out, and not only because he wrote an intimate chamber opera to match the play's spareness. "Our Town" opens with a hymn, and Mr. Rorem retained and refracted the familiar melody, turning pat modulations slightly bitter, as if the music were heard through a lens of nostalgia that turned it sepia. This nostalgia proved a hallmark of the score.

Sepia is a rich color: the music often sounded warm and burnished. Since Mr. Rorem divides the world into the ostensibly opposing categories of French and German, and puts himself in the French camp, it was startling to find so many Germanic elements in this score, with its use of motifs and even brief flickers of Straussian gesture to fit the play's underlying romanticism. Deftly matching the character of the play, Mr. Rorem's music is accessible, singable and full of integrity.

"Our Town," you may recall, is about life and love and death in Grover's Corners, N.H., early in the 20th century: boy (George Gibbs) meets girl next door (Emily Webb) amid white picket fences and the drugstore soda counter. Mr. McClatchy, while keeping most of the play's highlights, has distractingly sprinkled some rhyme over Wilder's deliberately plain words, swinging a piece balanced on the knife-edge between universality and sentimentality perilously toward kitsch.

The inherent problem with inserting music into a work that aims at plainness is epitomized by the Stage Manager, the play's ubiquitous narrator and the opera's most problematic role. In the play, this down-to-earth figure breaks down the "fourth wall" between actors and audience; but as an opera singer, he becomes just another performer onstage. What's more, many of the prosy parts of his narration are too long to sing. (In this production, by Vincent J. Liotta, some of the facts and figures he offers about the town are projected on the back wall of the set.) So he is left singing only the more poetic bits, which sound purple out of context.

In keeping with the small-town nature of the play, the opera's first performances are being presented by smaller companies and students around the country. If the cast members here were not uniformly strong, their youth and eagerness helped convey the play's spirit. Particularly noteworthy were Kevin Murphy as Dr. Gibbs, Jamie Barton as Mrs. Soames and Juliet Gilchrist as Mrs. Webb. Anna Steenerson, a light soprano, had nice success as Emily; Marc Schapman was an eager, boyish George. Eric McCluskey was not quite a match for the role of the Stage Manager. David Effron conducted the school's Philharmonic Orchestra.

Thanks to the poetic sensibilities of librettist J.D. McClatchy, the musical imagination of composer Ned Rorem, and the values embedded in the IU Opera Theater's world- premiere staging, the answers are yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Now, that doesn't mean audiences filed out of the Musical Arts Center on Friday and Saturday evenings humming tunes. Rorem hasn't written that kind of score.

What he has done is create a lyric tapestry that reaches deeply into matters of life, love and death, that evokes a peaceful New England town, Grover's Corner, in the early years of the 20th century.

The undercurrent is tragic. The placid aura of small town existence can be, indeed will be, destroyed. Death in childbirth separates the two young lovers of the story, Emily and George.

Emily, at story's end, seeks to maintain ties to the living. She asks to leave her grave and return to a happy moment from childhood, her 13th birthday. The experience proves traumatic. She sings the only full-scale aria of the opera, recognition that she cannot recapture the past, that she must bid goodbye to Grover's Corner, to new-ironed dresses and clocks ticking, to unappreciated moments that, upon death, take on significance.

Though the opera dawdles a bit toward the end, its earlier pacing has been carefully measured, and one gains a sensuous feel for the world Wilder shaped. A speech-song vocal line serves to highlight a marvelously rich orchestral element, subtle, chamber-scaled, and, dare one say, also a tad Wagnerian, in that themes often reside in the pit rather than on stage.

In terms of production, no one has gotten in the way. C. David Higgins' spare set features a platform that sweeps upward at stage rear for the projection of haunting scenes in sepia, these selected by graphic designers Keith Danielson, Alan Mauro and Ralph Zuzolo. Michael Schwandt's lighting effects are striking. Wooden chairs and ladders complete the picture.

Director Vincent Liotta has stressed simplicity of movement. Conductor David Effron has guided a reduced Philharmonic into a magical soundscape. The two casts have been well selected, too. Both Eric McCluskey and Christopher Wilburn excel as the Stage Manager, the teller of the story. A necessary youthfulness exudes from the portrayals of Emily and George, by Anna Steenerson and Marc Chapman on opening night, by Carolina Castells and Cody Fosdick on Saturday.

Casting is effective throughout: Julie Gilchrist, Elizabeth Baldwin, Benjamin Czarnota and Samuel Spade as Emily's parents; Sarah Mabary, Courtney Crouse, Kevin Murphy and Robert Samels as George's; Jamie Barton and Rachel Rose as the busybody neighbor, Mrs. Soames; Carmund White and Chester Pidduck as the troubled choirmaster.

Is there an after-premiere life for "Our Town?" There should be, and beyond the five co-commissioning productions. This "Our Town" is a lovely piece, more designed, however, for younger ensembles in smaller houses, not for, say, the massive Met or Chicago's Lyric. Its strength is intimacy.