The Met has announced the repertory for next season. It can be viewed in the PDF below or on the Met’s website. A few observations about the upcoming season:
While there is only one opera by Verdi and one by Wagner there will be two by Bellini. Both La Sonnambula and I Puritani will be new productions. The two Puccini operas (Bohemè and Butterfly) will be performed so often that they will make up almost half of the season. Traviata will consume about a quarter leaving a few scraps for all the rest of the operas. Of course, there will be three new operas that have about a 0.3% of survival. If anyone cares to know how I made this calculation I can supply the arithmetic later.
Ryan Speedo Green who will sing in a few supporting roles during the upcoming season will get the biggest part of his Met career when he assumes the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Xabier Anduaga the young Spanish tenor who is making a big impression at many of the major houses while still not 30 will appear as Elvino in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. if your Spanish is passable check out this video for more info about the tenor.
Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres will be in a new production of Tristan und
Isolde. Both singers will sing their roles in Wagner’s tale of errant love for the first time at the Met. Spyres who has more registers than the Royal Corp wanted to sing all nine solo parts but was talked out of the attempt by the president who threatened to ban transgender singing. Many mezzo-sopranos are grateful.
Asmik Grigorian will return to the Met as Tatania in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. This is a part that suits the great soprano perfectly.
The three new operas (all new productions) are The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay based on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Mason Bates composed the music set to Gene Scheer’s libretto. Here’s how the Met describes the opera.
In this exhilarating new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, set shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. Incorporating scintillating electronic elements and a variety of musical styles, composer Mason Bates’s eclectic score moves seamlessly among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy. Bartlett Sher’s production provides spectacular visuals to match, with towering sets and proscenium-filling projections designed by Jenny Melville and Mark Grimmer of 59. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Opening Night premiere, and baritone Andrzej Filończyk makes his Met debut as the artist Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechoslovakia and arrives at the Brooklyn doorstep of writer Sam Clay, sung by tenor Miles Mykkanen.
Innocence gets the following description:
Depicting the wide web of trauma left in the wake of a school shooting, the late, great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s final opera is a raw and unflinching cri de coeur in response to the senseless violence of our modern age. Captivating with its eerie, darkly beautiful sound-world and diverse vocal styles, ranging from traditional opera to expressionistic speak-singing to Scandinavian folk music, Innocence, with libretto by prominent Finnish author Sofi Oksanen, was greeted upon its 2021 premiere by awestruck reviews and hailed as “completely exhilarating” (The New York Times), “a modern masterpiece” (The Telegraph). For its Met premiere—in Simon Stone’s powerfully direct original production—the cast is anchored by mezzo- soprano Joyce DiDonato and Finnish ethno-pop singer Vilma Jää as a grieving mother and the daughter she lost in the shooting, as well as soprano Jacquelyn Stucker and tenor Miles Mykkanen as a young couple whose wedding, a decade after the tragedy, uncovers buried secrets and reopens old wounds. Maestro Susanna Mälkki, a close friend and collaborator of Saariaho’s, conducts what she calls “one of the most important works of our time.”
El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego gets this blurb:
American composer Gabriela Lena Frank makes her Met debut with her first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, the story depicts Frida, sung by leading mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The famously feuding pair briefly relive their tumultuous love, embracing both the passion and the pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met premiere of Frank’s opera, a “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) that “bursts with color and fresh individuality” (Los Angeles Times). The vibrant new production, taking enthusiastic inspiration from Frida and Diego’s paintings, is directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker, following her remarkable 2024 debut staging of Ainadamar.
I guess that the financially strapped Met hopes to recoup the cost of these new productions of new operas by building the season around Bohemè, Butterfly, and Traviata. But an old warhorse can get spavined.
