Metropolitan Opera Cancels Fall Season

Lincoln Center Plaza Fountain

March, 2018

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

A huge shock, though in some sense not actually a surprise: the Metropolitan Opera has canceled its fall season and announced changes to the spring season. All sympathies to the hundreds of artists affected by this: singers (soloists and chorus), orchestra members, directors, designers, stage crew, dressers, costume makers, makeup artists, wig designers, librarians, and anyone I've missed. All sympathies to other Met employees affected as well.

The link above is to Michael Cooper's article in The NY Times. I do not yet have a press release, but the Met home page has an update as follows:

Based on current information regarding the ongoing health crisis, we have made the difficult decision to cancel the first few months of the 2020–21 season. We now expect to re-open our doors and welcome audiences back to the Met on December 31, 2020, with a special gala performance, the details of which will be shared at a later date. Please take a moment to watch the message below from General Manager Peter Gelb.

Below the Gelb video:

Because of the lack of time available for technical preparations, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni will be performed in revivals of the Julie Taymor and Michael Grandage productions, respectively, rather than the previously announced new stagings by Simon McBurney and Ivo van Hove. These new productions, as well as the previously scheduled fall new stagings of Verdi’s Aida and Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel, will be rescheduled for later seasons. Van Hove’s Met-premiere production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, conducted by Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, remains on the schedule as planned. Maestro Nézet-Séguin will conduct a total of 26 performances over the course of the revamped season, including performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.

In February, when the house was previously scheduled to be dark, there will instead be additional performances of Puccini’s La Bohème, Bizet’s Carmen, and Verdi’s La Traviata. Soprano Angel Blue and tenor Joseph Calleja will lead the cast in La Bohème; mezzo-soprano Varduhi Abrahamyan will sing the title role of Carmen, with tenors Roberto Alagna and Russell Thomas as Don José and soprano Susanna Phillips as Micaela; and tenors Dmytro Popov and Stephen Costello will share the role of Alfredo in La Traviata. For scheduling reasons, the revival of Berg’s Lulu, originally planned to open March 5, has been canceled, and will be replaced by additional performances of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, featuring soprano Brenda Rae, who is switching from the title role of Lulu to her Met role debut as Rosina, with bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as Figaro. Tickets to these newly added February performances will go on sale to the general public on Monday, June 22, and further casting will be announced in the coming weeks.

In anticipation of changing audience expectations, the Met has moved up its evening curtain times to 7 p.m. whenever possible and shortened the running time of Handel’s Giulio Cesare from four-and-a-half hours with two intermissions to three-and-a-half hours with one intermission.

The shortened season will now feature seven Live in HD movie-theater presentations: Die Zauberflöte, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Don Giovanni, Dead Man Walking, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Verdi’s Nabucco, and Bellini’s Il Pirata. The three HD transmissions scheduled for the fall will be replaced by encore showings of past presentations of the same titles: Verdi’s Aida and Il Trovatore and Beethoven’s Fidelio.  

Ouch. The biggest personal pain for me is the replacement of Lulu with The Barber of Seville. I had hoped to see that Lulu. Well, at least Frau is still on the HD schedule.