The Metropolitan Opera has announced its 2025-26 season, which will include six new productions, three Met premieres, and twelve revivals from the company's repertoire.
The season will open September 21 with Mason Bates and Gene Scheer's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, directed by Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher. Based on Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the opera follows Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman, two Jewish cousins who break into the burgeoning comic book industry of the 1930s with the creation of an anti-fascist superhero called The Escapist, inspired by Josef's escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. Baritone Andrzej Filończyk and tenor Miles Mykkanen will star as the titular Kavalier and Clay, with mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa Saks, and baritone Edward Nelson as Tracy Bacon. Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct.
Innocence, the final opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, will have its Met premiere in April, in a production by Simon Stone. The work, whichj had its world premiere in 2021 at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, is set at a wedding where the groom's family has sought to conceal a family secret, that the groom's brother perpetrated a school shooting 10 years prior. The cast will include soprano Kathleen Kim and baritone Rod Gilfry as the parents of the bride, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as the waitress, and Finnish folk singer Vilma Jää as Markéta, reprising the role she played in the opera's 2021 premiere.
Rounding out the Met premieres will be Gabriela Lena Frank's El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Inspired by the life and work of Frida Kahlo, the opera tells a fictional story in which Frida returns from the underworld on the Day of the Dead to reunite with her husband Diego. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and baritone Carlos Alvarez will lead the cast as Frida and Diego, respectively, with soprano Gabriella Reyes as Catrina, and countertenor Nils Wanderer as Leonardo. The production will be directed by Deborah Colker, who made her Met debut this past fall helming the Met premiere of Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang's Ainadamar.
Director Yuval Sharon will make his much-anticipated Met debut helming a new production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Sharon made history in 2018 when he became the first American to direct at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, and has already been engaged to direct a new production of Wagner's four-opera Ring cycle, to be rolled out beginning in the 2027-28 season. Soprano Lise Davidsen will star as the Princess Isolde, with tenor Michael Spyres as Tristan. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova, baritone Tomasz Konieczny, and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green will round out the principal cast, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct Wagner's groundbreaking score, which Leonard Bernstein called "the central work of all music history."
Rounding out the new productions will be two operas by Bellini: La Sonnambula and I Puritani. La Sonnambula will star soprano Nadine Sierra as Amina, the titular somnambulist, whose sleepwalking adventures threaten her engagement with Elvino, played by tenor Xabier Anduaga. Soprano Sydney Mancasola and bass Alexander Vinogradov round out the principal cast as Lisa and the mysterious Count Rodolfo in the new production directed by tenor Rolando Villazon, pivoting from his acclaimed singing career to make his house directorial debut.
Also making his house directorial debut is Charles Edwards, who will helm the Met's first new production of I Puritani since 1976. Edwards' set designs have previously been seen at the Met in Il Trovatore, Adriana Lecouvreur, Don Carlos, and Fedora. Set during the English Civil War, I Puritani will star soprano Lisette Oropesa as Elvira, with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and baritone Artur Ruciński as her rival Royalist and Roundhead suitors, who fight for her hand, and for the future of England. Brownlee returns to his signature role of Arturo, which famously calls for a high F above C, the highest written tenor note in the standard operatic repertoire. Brownlee and Oropesa are in the process of becoming an I Puritani power couple, currently singing these roles at the Opera National de Paris, and having made a recording of the opera which was released in December 2024.
Charles I won't be the only King losing his head this season, as Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier will be revived at the Met for the first time since 2014. Giordano's French Revolution–set opera stars tenor Piotr Beczała as the titular Romantic poet, with soprano Sonya Yoncheva as the noblewoman Maddalena di Coigny, and baritone Igor Golovatenko as the servant-turned-revolutionary Carlo Gérard. Daniele Rustioni will conduct, launching his three-year term as Principal Guest Conductor at the Met.
Also returning for the first time since 2014 will be Richard Strauss' Arabella. The sixth and final collaboration between Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arabella concerns the complicated engagements of Arabella and her sister Zdenka, who, for financial reasons, has been raised by her parents as a boy using the name Zdenko. Sopranos Rachel Willis-Sørensen and Louise Alder star as Arabella and Zdenka/Zdenko, the former making her role debut, the latter her house debut. Baritone Tomasz Konieczny and tenor Pavol Breslik play Mandryka and Matteo, rival suitors for Arabella's hand, the latter with the assistance of Arabella's "brother," who is secretly in love with him herself.
On the lighter side of things is a revival of Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment, to star soprano Erin Morley as Marie, the titular Daughter of the Regiment, a foundling child who was raised by a troop of soldiers, led by baritone Peter Kálmán as Sergeant Sulpice. Tenor Lawrence Brownlee will join her as Tonio, the Tyrolean mountaineer who enlists in order to win her hand. When Marie's aunt, the Marquise of Berkenfield (to be played by mezzo-soprano Alice Coote) discovers her, she his astonished to witness the soldier-like manners with which her kin has been brought up, and whisks Marie away to teach her how to be a lady, with comedic consequences.
Rounding out the season line up will be revivals of La Bohéme, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin, Madama Butterfly, The Magic Flute, Porgy and Bess, La Traviata, and Turandot. Artists appearing in these productions will include Aigul Akhmetshina, Angel Blue, Stephanie Blythe, Asmik Grigorian, Angela Meade, Matthew Polenzani, Quinn Kelsey, and more.
The 2025-26 Met: Live in HD series will include screenings of La Sonnambula (October 18), La Bohéme (November 8), Arabella (November 22), Andrea Chenier (December 13), I Puritani (January 10), Tristan und Isolde (March 21), Eugene Onegin (May 2), and El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego (May 30).
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