We have heard much talk recently about Eliot Spitzer’s record as a governmental official before his precipitous fall. But few may know that on that record is a role in creating new operas.

As described in a program note by Stephen Blier, artistic director of New York Festival of Song, Mr. Spitzer’s investigation into the payola agreements between record companies and broadcasters led to the creation of a fund for “music education and appreciation for New York State residents.” The companies and broadcasters paid into that fund, and Mr. Blier, on behalf New York Festival of Song, received a grant from it. The result is a duo of one-act comic operas by two of our leading composers. “Bastianello” by John Musto and “Lucrezia” by William Bolcom had their world premieres in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall last Tuesday; a second sold-out performance was given Thursday.

The project, one of NYFOS’s most ambitious, might seem to stray from the organization’s mandate of promoting song, but the new operas, each of which has a libretto by Mark Campbell, are both so witty and text-oriented that they often behave like songs, a circumstance enhanced by the accompaniments for two pianos, which were capably rendered by Mr. Blier and his NYFOS colleague, Michael Barrett.

Each opera has a cast of five singers and is rooted in an Italian source. Mr. Campbell, who supplied the librettos for both of Mr. Musto’s prior operas, “Volpone” and “Later the Same Evening,” based “Bastianello” on an Italian folktale. The opera opens with a wedding, but when the bride goes to the cellar for more wine, she is overcome by depression upon concluding that her life is doomed to go downhill from here.

The opera moves from absurdist moments to a striking scene near the end when a fisherman sees the face of his wife, who drowned after an argument, appear in the reflection of the moon on a lake. Coming after music that is often bright and contrapuntally intricate, the texture became lyrically straightforward, making for music that was arresting in its expressive force. Among the elements of Mr. Musto’s appealingly wrought music elsewhere is a recurring motif that reminded me of the Forlane from Ravel’s “Le tombeau de Couperin.”

“Lucrezia” is the first collaboration between Mr. Cambell and Mr. Bolcom, whose new opera follows the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony by the Boston Symphony less than two weeks before. Where Bastianello has tender moments, “Lucrezia” is truculent, insouciant farce. It is based on Machiavelli’s satirical comedy “La Mandragola,” with the locale shifted to Argentina to give Mr. Bolcom an outlet to deploy music of a colorfully Spanish tinge. He is said to have “wanted to write a zarzuela as imagined by the Marx brothers,” and the result is plenty zany.

Machiavelli’s story is hard-edged in telling of the seduction of the heroine Lucrezia, but Mr. Cambell softens the tale by allowing Lucrezia to be in on the plot. Indeed, in an aria with a bolero-like rhythm, she sings forthrightly of her fondness for sex; both operas are structured so as to allow for arias, duets, and ensembles. The score of “Lucrezia” is full of Spanish and quasi Spanish illusions — tangos and habaneras, touches of flamenco, assertive bullfight-style music, and grand Spanish-style waltzes, all in the service of Mr Bolcom’s much trearued comic flair. “Lucrezia” is funnier and more high-spirited than the more introverted “Bastinallo,” yet the operas nicely complemented each other, with each having a vibrant theatrical core.

Leon Major’s direction of the fine cast of singing actors was simple yet easily sufficed to bring out the operas’ vitality. Lisa Vroman sang with a bright, resonant soprano as the groom’s mother Ortensia in “Bastianello” and returned as Lucrezia’s mother, whose desire for a grandson overcomes her moral scruples. Sasha Cooke’s suave mezzo took on a suitably maudlin touch as the hapless bride Amadora and brought high spirits to Lucrezia’s sex aria.

Paul Appleby sang with a fine, clear tenor as both the narrator in “Bastianello” and Lucrezia’s young admirer Lorenzo. Baritone Patrick Mason underscored the pathos of the fisherman’s song, and was suitably stolid as Lucrezia’s dimwitted husband Ignacio. In drawing a moral in “Bastianello” about a good deed being its own reward, the rich voiced bass Matt Boehler suggested that Stravinsky’s Nick Shadow might be on his horizons. And he excelled as Chucho, who masterminds the plot of “Lucrezia,” extracting a sack of gold from each of the other characters in the process.