The composer John Adams and his frequent collaborator, the librettist and director Peter Sellars, are getting the band back together with “Girls of the Golden West,” a new opera about the women of California’s Gold Rush. It will receive its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2017, the company announced on Tuesday.

The two men have collaborated on operas that have become part of the American canon: Mr. Sellars directed the first productions of many of Mr. Adams’s works, including “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Doctor Atomic,” which was also set to his libretto.

Their new opera, which is drawn from historical sources, will weave together the stories of women living in a small mining community in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1850. Mr. Sellars said he was drawn to the period after he came across a trove of historical material while he was working on a production of Puccini’s Gold Rush opera, “La Fanciulla del West,” which is usually translated in English as “The Girl of the Golden West.”