THE RETURN OF ULYSSES. Music by Claudio Monteverdi, libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. Production by John Cox. With Leah Summers, Phyllis Pancella, Katharine Goeldner, Stephen Powell, John Mac Master and Keith Phares. New York City Opera ensemble conducted by Daniel Beckwith. Attended at Saturday's opening. New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. Repeated tonight, Thursday and Nov. 4 and 7.

IN THE LAST MINUTES of Monteverdi's opera "The Return of Ulysses," Penelope, the stubbornly loyal wife who for years has been sustained by an insane certainty that her husband would return from the void, must confront the fact that he actually has. She refuses to believe at first: Penelope has spent too long immersed in stubborn fantasy, keeping reality at bay.

It's a wrenchingly topical moment, though its outlines were written by Homer and though Monteverdi set it to music 350 years ago. Among the most powerful memories of September is that of thousands of New York Penelopes plastering the city with pictures of the disappeared, clinging to the wild hope that a spouse or a child could still walk out of the ash.

Everyone who has the capacity to be moved by opera should see New York City Opera's new production of Monteverdi's "Ulysses," not because of the story's sudden, unwanted relevance but because it demonstrates how vital and vivid the antique can be. In that final scene, the marvelous Phyllis Pancella stepped from crumbling stoicism to unfolding bliss, the choked outbursts of recitative giving way to full-blown melody. She is a singer of uncommon gifts: She conveyed extreme emotions with supreme restraint. Her singing was controlled, her voice not large but luxuriantly dark, and she revealed the role from somewhere deep inside the music, not by slathering on expressive mannerisms.

Stephen Powell, as Ulysses, sang with a muscular baritone and understated discipline, arriving at joy like a traumatized soldier coming home in a welter of frustration and nobility. It is rare in opera for a climactic embrace to be more than a mechanical body block. Here, at the end of a work in which the two protagonists hardly even share the stage, a kiss became a musical transformation.

"Ulysses," one of the few surviving Monteverdi scores and a product of his old age, possesses music of intimate beauty, which Daniel Beckwith conducted with straightforward grace. Performing it requires a certain amount of archaeological reconstruction, but there was not a whiff of mustiness to City Opera's blue-and-gold production. The opera is a series of solemn soliloquies, offset by moments of rowdy comedy. Deities address the audience by turn, making their cases for altering human lives like delegates at a convention. Each of Penelope's suitors tries to string the hero's unbending bow, but not before placing himself under the protection of an appropriate god. Penelope confides the grief to which she has become accustomed in bursts of tight-lipped lyricism.

All this stateliness can be deadly, and directors frequently fight it with too much stage business. But director John Cox has evidently understood the music well enough to rely on measured movement, the resplendent robes designed by Johan Engles, and Mark McCullough's endlessly inventive lighting. Brilliantly swathed gods enter on mechanical arms that swing silently above the stage. One level down, the people stumble through their destinies in unobtrusive choreography. Cox knows when to disappear.

The cast is large and the singing was not uniformly splendid, but enough of it was good enough to make this "Ulysses" a delight to hear again (the production had its premiere at Glimmerglass three years ago). Keith Phares as Ulysses' son Telemachus, Katharine Goeldner as Minerva, John Mac Master as the loyal shepherd Eumaeus and Wilbur Pauley as a useless suitor all stood out.