The Metropolitan Opera has announced its new season for 2025/26 with six new productions, including three Met premieres, and 12 revivals. 

The Met premieres for the new season will include the season opener, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Mason Bates, Kaija Saariaho’s final opera Innocence, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego. Three further new productions will comprise of a staging of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and a pair of Bellini operas, I Puritani and La Sonnambula. 

On the new season, the Met’s Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, says: ‘I am delighted to be leading four incredible operas this season. Two that have special significance to me are written by composers whose works I have championed for some time, Mason Bates and Gabriela Lena Frank. Hearing their music in conversation with Mozart, Puccini, and Saariaho demonstrates the broad artistic range of the Met. I am excited for this thrilling season ahead.’ 

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay will feature the return of librettist Gene Scheer for a novel-to-opera adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winner of the same name. On 21 September, baritone Andrzej Filończyk will make 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. The score incorporates electronic elements and three distinct musical styles: 1940s big band, the Eastern-European folk music of Prague, and techno symphonic music. 

Late Finnish composer Saariaho’s Innocence comprises a libretto by author Sofi Oksanen and will be conducted by Susanna Mälkki. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and Finnish ethno-pop singer Vilma Jää will feature as a grieving mother and the daughter she lost, while soprano Jacquelyn Stucker and tenor Miles Mykkanen will appear as a young couple whose wedding uncovers buried secrets. Lucy Shelton is also set to make her Met debut in the role of the Teacher. The opera is inspired by Strauss’ Elektra and Berg’s Wozzeck, and premieres on 6 April. 

American composer Gabriela Lena Frank will make her Met debut on 14 May with El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, a magical-realist tale opera focused on Mexico’s Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The story depicts Kahlo, who will be sung by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Rivera, who will be portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The libretto is by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, and will be directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker. 

In Wagner’s opera, soprano Lise Davidsen will portray the Irish princess Isolde opposite tenor Michael Spyres as the lovedrunk Tristan. It will be Music Director Nézet-Séguin’s first time leading Tristan und Isolde at the Met, which opens 9 March. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova will reprise her portrayal of Brangäne, alongside bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny’s Kurwenal. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green will portray King Marke for the first time. 

On 6 October, Bellini’s La Sonnambula will open, including soprano Nadine Sierra performing as Amina alongside tenor Xabier Anduaga, soprano Sydney Mancasola and bass Alexander Vinogradov. The first new Met production of I Puritani in nearly 50 years will feature a quartet of soprano Lisette Oropresa, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, baritone Artur Ruciński and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn in the principle roles when it opens on New Year’s Eve. 

Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager remarks of the new season: ‘We’re excited about our varied 2025–26 lineup, which should thrill seasoned opera lovers as well as the new audiences we would like to attract. In these uncertain times, we hope that our performances will provide solace for a world sorely in need of it.’ 

metopera.org