Opera has inspired many of the 20th century’s greatest artists to create extraordinary sets. Oskar Kokoschka designed a Magic Flute for Salzburg and a Ballo in maschera for Florence. Salvador Dalí produced a controversial Salome for London; David Hockney’s designs for Glyndebourne’s Rake’s Progress complement Stravinsky’s sound-world so miraculously that they are still in use 50 years after their creation. Marc Chagall’s ceiling fresco for Paris’s Opéra Garnier and murals for the New York Met testify to the intimate connection between opera and painting.

And yet remarkably few operas portray visual artists. Something about their painstaking work seems to resist representation in this most extravagant of artforms. Only two operas about artists are regularly performed: Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, depicting the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini – and Cellini gave Berlioz a head-start with his rollicking memoirs about his scandalous adventures in 16th-century Florence.

By taking a piece of art as subject matter, then, Scottish Opera’s The Great Wave enters largely uncharted territory. The print that gives the new production its name is one of the most familiar images of the past 200 years, even if relatively few of those who encounter it on fridge magnets or phone cases realise exactly where it comes from or know much about the life of the artist who created it.

Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, now known as Tokyo, then the world’s largest city with over a million inhabitants. He lived to 88 at a time when only a handful of Japanese each year passed 60. His life was eventful: he survived being struck by lightning, a stroke that forced him to relearn how to draw, and a fire that destroyed his studio. His output was prolific and diverse – his 30,000 or so surviving works include paintings, sketches and the illustrations that fill Hokusai Manga, a drawing manual for students, as well as woodblock prints – and he constantly reinvented himself, using at least 30 names. He was a gifted self-publicist, attracting huge crowds by painting a gigantic portrait in a public square, but often in financial difficulty.

Under the Wave off Kanagawa – his most celebrated work’s original title – was one of his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock prints produced around 1831, which was so successful that Hokusai later added another 10. It is an unforgettable image: although our attention naturally focuses on the cascading foam and menacing undertow of the wave, so vividly depicted that the boats that ride it seem to move as we look, the image’s still centre is Mount Fuji itself, regarded in Hokusai’s time as a deity.

Just as Hokusai’s sequence of prints viewed the mountain from various viewpoints, many unexpected, the opera’s five acts approach the artist himself from different angles, arranged in a sequence that’s anything but chronological – the opera begins with Hokusai’s funeral. As librettist Harry Ross explains, the decision to tell Hokusai’s story in a non-linear way was taken in solidarity with the worldview of Hokusai and the culture of which he was part: “We’re teleological in the west – this is very much an eastern thing.”

The thread that runs through the libretto, drawing together scenes otherwise highly diverse in setting, character and dramaturgy, is Hokusai’s relationship with his daughter, Ōi, also a significant artist. It is Ōi that we see at the start, supervising her father’s burial, and Ōi with whom he is conversing at the end, as the pair resolve to continue artistic exploration together.

Ōi had married another artist, but divorced him, as Ross recounts with evident admiration: “He wasn’t a very good artist, and she wasn’t going to run a business with someone who wasn’t going to succeed.” Instead she returned to her father’s studio. Ross and composer Dai Fujikura are fascinated by these decisions, very unusual for the time, and by the two artists’ bond. “Ōi is an extraordinary character – we don’t know much about her but we know enough,” Ross says. “The relationship between father and daughter was very special,” Fujikura notes. “We both have daughters, so it was very easy to tap into that.”

Fujikura grew up in Japan, but until he visited the British Museum’s Hokusai exhibition in 2017, all he knew about the artist was that he had produced The Great Wave. It was Fujikura’s wife, after they read more about him in the exhibition catalogue, who suggested the artist as a subject for an opera and he was intrigued – “I’d never written an opera set in Japan.”

“It is a wild ride, a fascinating life,” Fujikura says with relish. He began to share ideas with Ross, a close collaborator since the 1990s when they met as students at Trinity College of Music. Together they devised a scenario drawing on an unpublished English translation of the first Hokusai biography, written by Iijima Kyoshin in 1893.

Much of their work on the scenario was done during the Covid lockdown, a situation uncannily mirroring the closed nature of Japanese society in Hokusai’s lifetime. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa military government who ruled Japan imposed a policy of sakoku, literally “locked country”. Between the early 17th century and the mid-19th, international trade was all-but forbidden, and Japan was closed to almost all foreign visitors.

Indeed, the only non-Japanese character in The Great Wave is the German botanist and traveller Dr Philipp Franz von Siebold, played by a countertenor – the “falsetto” voice aptly reflecting how strange Siebold’s western face would have seemed to most Japanese of the time. Siebold brings a large sack of Prussian Blue pigment (a rare commodity in Japan at the time) in payment for some of Hokusai’s prints: an acquisition that delights Hokusai, since it enables him to realise the vibrant colours he has imagined for his Mount Fuji series.

Fujikura relished the opportunity the scene offered to represent Hokusai’s new colour in music: “People are seeing an object they’ve never seen before, something very special – it’s like the moment in Pulp Fiction where they open the attache case and we don’t know what it is.” He found a combination of timbres to represent Hokusai’s blue: “Natural harmonic trills blended with artificial harmonics and a shimmering vibraphone played with soft mallets.”

Fujikura’s early musical training as pianist and composer in Osaka, not untypically, was entirely in western styles; traditional Japanese instruments formed no part of his musical upbringing: “Even my parents never heard them live.” It was only in the early 2000s, at a festival in Darmstadt, that he first encountered these instruments, and had to learn about them as a western composer would: “They have such a long history, they make Bach look like a baby.” He has now composed about 40 works for Japanese instruments, including concertos for shō (a bamboo mouth organ), koto (a long, plucked zither), shamisen (a three-stringed lute) and shakuhachi.

It was the last of these – a traditional Japanese flute which makes a softer and breathier sound than the western version – that Fujikura has included in The Great Wave. “I wanted to transport listeners into another realm.” Fujikura explains that the noise of the player’s breath is part of the performance, and that he has encouraged the player – Shozan Hasegawa, who has travelled from Japan to perform – to improvise in traditional style around the notated pitches.

The shakuhachi is heard in the opera’s opening bars, and reappears at the end, where the director Satoshi Miyagi features the instrument on stage: he interprets its sound as the voice of Hokusai, resonating in his daughter’s mind. What comes between uses only traditional western instruments, but deployed with a colourfulness and immediacy that reflects Fujikura’s initial ambitions to compose for film. “I can express everything with my music: the orchestra is my palette.”

The production has been a remarkable example of cross-cultural collaboration: there was financial support from Japanese government agencies (plans are well under way for the production to transfer in 2027 to Tokyo and Kyoto) and in Glasgow, Miyagi is joined by a team of Japanese designers and choreographers from the Kajimoto company. Although the set and costumes do not attempt to recreate Hokusai’s Japan – “by not specifying the cultural background or the time period, it allows the piece to be universal,” Miyagi explains – the Japanese influence is clear. How to feature The Great Wave itself was a particular challenge for scenographer Junpei Kiz: “It is such an iconic piece. There is going to be anticipation of how it will be presented.” His intriguing solution was to introduce it in monochrome before revealing the full colour spectrum.

It is clear, however, that for Ross and Fujikura, as for Miyagi, Hokusai’s story is one whose message is universal. Ross finds cause for optimism for today’s artists in the resourcefulness and capacity for reinvention that Hokusai showed throughout his career. “He’s quite contemporary – we have this notion of the Romantic artist who’s always struggling, but in the 21st century we’re more like Hokusai – we must change to stay the same.” Fujikura agrees: “He shows such strong energy, just to be an artist, a better artist. Nonstop creativity – that’s something I absolutely love about this person.”

• The Great Wave is at Theatre Royal Glasgow, on 12 and 14 February and Festival Theatre, Edinburgh 19 and 21 February.