When Benjami𒉰n Perry Wenzelberg returns to New Jersey’s Tenafly Middle School this fall, he can pen a “What I Did🌺 This Summer” essay no other kid can match.
Then again, no other 13-year-old will have written an opera and heard it sung, as Benjamin will when his “The Sleeping Be🦹auty” premieres tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Chelsea Opera.
The young virtuoso springs from a musical family, at least on his mom’s side. (His dad’s a photographer for The Post.) Benjamin speaks proudly of his maternal great-grandmother, Pauline Covner, who conducted at Carnegie 🌱Hall in 1950.
He’s already devoted years of his short life to music: composition lessons at the Ju⛎illiard School since he was 9, plus four seasons with the Metropolitan Opera Children♋’s Chorus.
It was there, singing Puccini, that he was inspired to write something𝄹 of his own: “After crying many times ಌin ‘La Bohème,’ I wanted to write an opera that has a happy ending.”
The Met’s varied repertoire helped inform his eclectic musical style, Benjamin says. A primary influence is another Benjamin — Britten, whose spooky “The Tu𒅌rn of the Screw” the young singer performed last winter with New York City Opera. His star turn as the tormented boy, Miles, won raves.
Chelsea Opera c♛o-founder Leonarda Priore is a fan, too. She says,“He has been impressing us since the first ෴time we met, in 2009 . . . and he only improves with age!”
Benjamin started “The Sleeping Beauty⛎” two years ago, but recently revised it to make it “more cohesive, more contemporary.”
He’s also somehow found time — between composition classes, piano lessons and preparing for the Met’s new season, where he’ll have a solo part in Britten’s “A Midsummerꦓ Night’s Dream” — to indulge his secret passion: roller coasters.
Laughing, he recalls a recent outin💧g to Pennsylvania’s Hershey-Park.
“I ran straight to Storm Runner, my all-time favorite roller coaster,” he says. “The l♋ast time I was there, a couple years ago, I couldn’t ride it . . . “I was too little then.”
“The Sleeping Beauty” gets a concert reading at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church, 120 W. 69th St., tomorrow at 8 p.m. For tickets, $15, call 212-260-1796.