The Metropolitan Opera, which has championed contemporary opera in recent years as it works to attract new audiences, announced on Wednesday that it would bring three modern titles to its stage in the 2025-26 season.
The company will open the season in September with the New York City premiere of Mason Bates’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” an opera based on the 2000 novel of that name by Michael Chabon, which was first heard at Indiana University last fall. The lineup also includes local premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, “Innocence,” from 2021, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” from 2022.
There will be new stagings of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Yuval Sharon, in his company debut; Bellini’s “I Puritani,” for the annual New Year’s Eve gala; and Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón and featuring the soprano Nadine Sierra. Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Bizet’s “Carmen,” Strauss’s “Arabella” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier.”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will conduct the new productions of “The Amazing Adventures,” “El Último Sueño” and “Tristan.”
The company’s embrace of contemporary opera, which its leaders have said is necessary to overcome serious financial pressures, with the belief that newer works sell better than the classics, has had mixed results. Attendance has averaged about 70 percent of capacity so far this season, compared with 73 percent at the same point last season. (Still, the Met said that it expected to reach an average of 75 percent capacity by the end of the season.)
“It’s impossible to predict hits,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “On the other hand, if we don’t promote new works, then we’re saying goodbye to the art form.”
Here are five highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
‘Arabella’
Richard Strauss’s final collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his librettist has some strange energies: Weimar-era angst about class and gender roles figures in the plot, with alternating farce and despair throughout. It needs a lead soprano who can energize Arabella, a character who can come across more as being acted upon than acting on her own. Enter Rachel Willis-Sorensen, whose creamy-toned Leonora enlivened “Il Trovatore” earlier this season. She will star opposite the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny in a revival of Otto Schenk’s classic staging. Opens Nov. 10. SETH COLTER WALLS
‘Tristan und Isolde’
The inventive director Yuval Sharon, the first American to stage an opera at Wagner’s festival in Bayreuth, Germany, is creating a new production of Wagner’s voluptuous romance “Tristan und Isolde,” starring the tenor Michael Spyres and the majestic soprano Lise Davidsen. Under normal circumstances, it would be a massive undertaking in its own right, but in this case, it’s also a prelude: Sharon and Davidsen will team up again for a new staging of Wagner’s “Ring” in a few seasons. Opens March 19. OUSSAMA ZAHR
‘Innocence’
Kaija Saariaho’s last, and perhaps greatest, opera is a slowly self-revealing thriller about the tendrils of pain and trauma that extend from a tragic event at an international school in Finland. “Innocence” will come to the Met with much of what made its premiere, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, such a triumph: Susanna Mälkki, a friend of Saariaho’s and one of her finest interpreters, at the podium; Lucy Shelton and Vilma Jää’s haunting vocals; and Simon Stone’s restless, chillingly realistic production. Opens April 6. JOSHUA BARONE
‘Eugene Onegin’
The soprano Asmik Grigorian’s voice is a focused conduit for flooding emotion, the kind that pours out of Tatiana, the yearning teenager at the heart of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. Igor Golovatenko sings Onegin, who requites her love too late, alongside Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Lenski. The veteran mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe appears in the small but characterful role of the nanny Filippyevna, and the 31-year-old conductor Timur Zangiev makes his Met debut leading one of opera’s most sumptuous, gripping scores. Opens April 20. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego’
This opera, by Gabriela Lena Frank and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, begins with death. In a reversal of the Orpheus tale, Frida Kahlo returns to earth once more to guide her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld on the Day of the Dead. The Met’s production, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, features the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard in the title role. With direction and choreography by Deborah Kolker, who staged the fiery “Ainadamar” last fall, this promises to be another visually sumptuous spectacle. Opens May 14. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
