Step inside Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Directed by Tony Award®–winner Diane Paulus, Masquerade is a bold new immersive production of the world’s most haunting love story. Journey through the Paris Opera... More

La Bohème is the quintessential tale of bohemian life. A group of struggling artists (a poet, a painter, a musician, and a philosopher) navigating poverty, friendship, and the fierce joy of youth in the Latin Quarter of Paris. F... More

La Bohème, the passionate, timeless, and indelible story of love among young artists in Paris, can stake its claim as the world’s most popular opera. It has a marvelous ability to make a powerful first impression and to reveal ... More

A searingly dramatic setting of Friedrich Schiller’s play about Mary, Queen of Scots, and her political and personal rivalry with Queen Elizabeth I of England, Maria Stuarda had a troubled genesis, despite its musical and theatr... More

The opera is set in and around Paris, with familiar landmarks such as the church of St. Sulpice forming important reference points in the story. The opera was originally set in the early 18th century, but the Met’s current produ... More

The third and final collaboration between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte is a fascinating paradox: a frothy comedy of manners with an intensely dark take on human nature; an old story (it has antecedents in Boccaccio, Shak... More

Following his smash-hit company debut with The Hours, composer Kevin Puts returns to the Met with his Pulitzer Prize–winning first opera, inspired by the true events of the 1914 Christmas truce, when soldiers spontaneously set a... More

Set in an idealized Vienna of the past, Strauss’s most popular opera concerns a wise woman of the world who is involved with a much younger lover but ultimately forced to accept the laws of time, giving him up to a pretty young ... More

The source of this popular opera is a single chapter in the biblical Book of Judges, and the brevity of the tale did nothing to prevent it from becoming one of the world’s great stories of love (or at least passion)—as well as... More

Often cited as Italian opera’s greatest tragedy, Otello is a miraculous union of music and drama—a masterpiece as profound philosophically as it is thrilling theatrically. Shakespeare’s tale of an outsider, a great hero who ... More

The opera is set in the Greek city of Corinth, a wealthy and sophisticated locale already ancient by the time of the events in the opera. Medea herself is a foreigner from Colchis, a land thought by Greeks to be wealthy but primit... More

Wagner’s final opera is a musical journey unlike any other. The composer preferred to call his mature works “music dramas,” but he set Parsifal even further apart by naming it a Bühnenweihfestspiel, a “festival play for t... More

The supernatural story takes place in the “bardo,” a transitional plane between the end of this life and the beginning of the next, populated by those who resist all the powers of light and darkness and refuse to accept their ... More

This grandest of grand operas features an epic backdrop for what is in essence an intimate love story. Set in ancient Egypt and packed with magnificent choruses, complex ensembles, and elaborate ballets, Aida never loses sight of ... More

Puccini’s “American” opera, based on David Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West, had its glamorous and highly publicized world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, with the composer in the audience. The drama is set d... More

A beloved New York holiday tradition, Mozart’s enchanting fable takes the stage in the Met’s abridged, English-language production by Julie Taymor—the Tony Award–winning director of Broadway’s The Lion King. Running unde... More

Jenůfa takes place in a remote Moravian village in the last decades of the 19th century. Janáček’s focus on common people with real problems connects his work conceptually to what Puccini, Mascagni, and others were doing in t... More

The season opens with hair-raising drama and spectacular singing as two of opera’s most extraordinary artists star in Macbeth, Verdi’s thrilling take on the immortal Shakespearean tale of the scheming couple determined to seiz... More

No opera is more tied to its setting than Tosca, which takes place in Rome on the morning of June 17, 1800, through dawn the following day. The specified settings for each of the three acts—the Church of Sant’Andrea della Vall... More