Contemporary works will be front and center in the coming season, the Metropolitan Opera announced on Wednesday, with four company premieres among its six new productions.
The 2024-25 season will open in September with “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare, by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, and will also feature the modern works “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer; “Ainadamar,” by Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang and “Antony and Cleopatra,” by John Adams. It will be the fifth opera by Adams that the Met has presented, putting him in the same category as Tchaikovsky and Bellini.
There will also be new stagings of Verdi’s “Aida” and Strauss’s “Salome.” Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and “Il Trovatore,” Puccini’s “Tosca” and “La Bohème,” and Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” as well as two versions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”: the full-length, original in German, directed by Simon McBurney, and a one-act, English adaptation that has become a holiday staple at the Met.
The lineup is part of the house’s efforts to attract new audiences by embracing contemporary operas, which are outselling many of the classics. The Met is still grappling with headwinds as it works to recover from the pandemic. In January, the company said it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment to help cover operating expenses.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview that the new season reflected the “artistic hopes and challenges and constraints that we face.”
“We have to be fiscally responsible,” he said. “At the same time, I think that what we’re offering really pushes immense artistic boundaries.”
