Every now and then, in this naughty world, someone does—or tries to do—something right, and the very attempt can be satisfying. For instance, the most recent undertaking by the BU Opera Workshop and Opera Institute (its two-year non-degree professional training program—Phyllis Curtin is the artistic director) was the world premiere of Freshwater, an opera by 38-year-old Welsh-born (now Boston resident) Andy Vores to a short play written between 1923 and 1935 by Virginia Woolf for private performance.

Woolf herself, stage director Will Graham (chairman of the opera department) tells us in his program note, thought her 20th-century caricature of eminent Victorians (Tennyson, the painter G.F. Watts, photographer Julia Cameron, even Queen Victoria herself) was "tosh." Her satire of high-minded Victorian attitudes toward Art and Life, which also teases her own Bloomsbury  circle, is virtually plotless—a mixture of Chekhovian inertia and aburdist farce (Cameron and her philosopher husband keep talking about going to India but won't leave until their their ant-proof coffins arrive). In a barely fictionalized romance, the 16-year old Ellen Terry, already a famous actress and married to the elderly Watts, tosses her wedding ring to a porpoise and leaves her husband for a young naval lieutenant and an un-Victorian brave new world.

In some ways, Freshwater reminds me of the sort of text Virgil Thomson was looking for in his collaboration with Gertrude Stein, where joky modernist discontinuities are more important than 19th-century logic or realistic psychological "motivation." Thomson is certainly one of the ancestors of Vores's score, with its emphasis on colorful orchestrations (inventive percussion with delicate winds), dance rhythms, and playful dissonances rather than on violin tunes in heavy syrup. The second scene, on the chalky rocks at the shore of the Isle of Wight, is preceded by a musical interlude beginning with the watery undulations of flute and clarinet over waves of harp until a deadpan single shake of maracas hints at a fandango.

Comedy is in the music: a donkey's heehaw, departing sleigh bells and horses' hooves, a desperate presto in the strings depicting an off-stage turkey trying to escape execution, a skewed quotation of Schubert's Who is Sylvia? when Charles Cameron describes his dream of a mystery woman, hints of parades and the music hall. The score might not be subtle, but it's refreshingly unpretentious. The larger problem is that it's so relentlessly jaunty, there are few moments in which the voices are allowed to take flight. That seacoast scene is essentially one long duet for the two young lovers, but the music burbles away in the same chirpy recitative style (and these particular lovers had the two least appealing voices). The best number was the extended, madrigal-like "Goodbye" ensemble near the end, in which the characters, like the guests in Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, seem incapable of leaving.

Considerable expense was spared, yet Jessica Pazdernik's costumes were elegant, witty, and convincingly period, and Brent Wachler's sets (the Camerons' house at Freshwater was a freestanding stained-glass doorway surrounded by wallfuls of paintings and empty frames hanging wall-less) were imaginative and evocative. Graham moved his seven singing actors fluidly around the roomy Boston University Theatre stage. I was glad to see choreographer Judith Chaffee listed as "movement coach," though most of these young performers (like most opera singers everywhere) obviously still need work in this respect. Conductor David Hoose kept the rhythms tight and the playing crisp and airy, even during the most tentative opening-night moments. Still, the orchestration often covered the voices, and the apparent amplification made almost everyone sound shrill and tended to obliterate diction (especially the women's). What's the good of witty dialogue if the words can't be understood?