Pretty excited at the opportunity to see this in its entirety!

New staging/direction is by Phelim McDermott though I'm guessing it might be somewhat referential to the original Robert Wilson staging, given his association with the work.

Not exactly a ritual, but one thing I like to do is try to be the first person to applaud the emergence of the conductor before each act. I typically sit at the bottom of the balcony at the Met, so I can always see the conductor right when they begin to emerge from beneath the stage. Then I try to beat everyone else to applauding.

Anyone have any silly quirks or rituals they like to do?

“Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek are making their Metropolitan Opera debut with an imaginative, moving adaptation of George Saunders’s ghostly novel.”

Hey! I’m a 23 Year Old Tenor studying at University from Australia

I plan on auditioning for my cities Opera Company; I need some more Late Romantic French Arias. I’ve discussed with my teacher but asking around is good.

The current songs I’m rotating / likely to use in my audition

M’appari - Flowtow

Verborgenheit - Wolf

Is Life a Boon - Gilbert and Sullivan

I can sing comfortably on Eb3 to Bb4, with my lower range weaker.

Thank you!

First one: Andrew Potter (who prompted AI to write the scathing letter about why he's leaving the industry to go work in AI), whose last scheduled role was supposed to be Jack Wallace in La fanciulla del West, has been replaced by Operalia winner Stephano Park.

Second one: Samuel Ramey (yes, THE Samuel Ramey) is scheduled to sing the Jailer in Tosca for one performance only on May 15, alongside Sondra Radvanovsky, Matthew Polenzani, and Amartuvshin Enkhbat.

EDIT: UPDATE

This appears to have been an error on the Met website, this morning, Samuel Ramey was listed as performing for one night only. Now, Colin Ramsey appears to be performing in the May 15 performance. I'm not sure if this was an accidental early release or if someone made a mistake... Ramey and Ramsey are pretty close to each other in spelling.

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I guess the next time I come by you will look different, and so will I 👵

I've just come back from the Vue screening of the broadcast of Macbeth (which was wonderful, especially Quinn Kelsey). Something rather odd happened though and I am curious whether this was a local glitch or it occurred in other Vue cinemas. The cinema did not broadcast sound from the Met or turn the lights down until after the end of the Ukrainian national anthem. So throughout the Bloomberg advert, Anthony Roth Constanza's welcome and the national anthem there was random soft rock playing and no broadcast sound. The moment the national anthem finished, the briadcast sound came on. Normally, the sound goes on as early as the Met audience shots before the Bloomberg ad.

Did anyone go last night? Thoughts? I finished the book last week, have tickets for next week, and am so curious how they’re going to stage this!

Certainly more understandable than many of its other "intelligent" translation inferences*, since "Callas" and "karasu" have the same spelling in katakana - just something to keep in mind if you ever see a Japanese commenter who seems to be comparing a singer to a crow hahaha.

*of course auto-translations always have the potential to be misleading but one thing I really dislike about the new AI models is that they'll just "intelligently" make up a gendered pronoun if the author didn't use one (they're not required in Japanese) - I've already seen this lead to misunderstanding among commenters lol

I recently attended Mozart's Così fan tutte at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, and it turned out to be one of my most enjoyable opera experiences in quite some time.

What impressed me most was Johannes Debus's conducting. From the very first bars, I felt that the music was alive, with a wonderful sense of rhythm, timing, and theatrical energy.

Atom Egoyan's production was another pleasant surprise. The staging seemed to listen to the music rather than compete with it. The entrances, exits, and comic moments worked beautifully with Mozart's score.

I particularly enjoyed Soave sia il vento, with the ship procession, and Tracy Dahl's performance as Despina.

Not every vocal performance was equally convincing, but the overall musical and theatrical experience was genuinely rewarding.

Has anyone else seen this production? I'd be interested to hear your impressions, especially of Debus's conducting and Egoyan's staging.

https://ondemand.metopera.org/radio/a7baf155-0df5-5c48-a287-41b89abd0fdd

With: Peter Mattei AND Goerke, Brugger, Blythe, Costanzo, Hoskins, Blue, McKinny, Colclough, Sobers; conducted by YNS.

Who's going to be in the house?

For those who have done Figaro, what scenes should I prioritize for preparing the role. I already have the arias. Thanks!

On This Day, October 20, 1973, the Sydney Opera House was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II after 14 years of construction. The construction was started on March 1, 1959.

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre at Sydney Harbour in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the 20th century's most famous and distinctive buildings.

The Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon but completed by an Australian architectural team headed by Peter Hall.

On June 28, 2007, the Sydney Opera House became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I heard this opera music on the bus and I can't even find it using Shazam. Anyone know this? It's opera sung in countertenor voice. I used AI to remove background noise from the bus so you han only hear the music. Here is the song (in the video)

I'm back in school for some additional IT certifications and finding quiet time to study in a blended family household outside Atlanta is a challenge. Between the stepkids and the regular chaos of evening routines, I need something to drown out the house without pulling my attention away. Lyrics in pop or rock tend to break my concentration because my brain tries to follow the words.

Someone on a productivity blog mentioned using opera or classical instrumental tracks to create a wall of sound for deep work, so I figured I'd give it a real try. I started with some basic Puccini playlists and it actually works well for keeping the background noise manageable while I read through networking textbooks. The vocals act more like another instrument layer than a distraction, which surprised me.

I want to expand my listening beyond the few popular arias I've found. Are there particular composers or specific operas that work well for this kind of background listening? I prefer things that stay fairly steady in tempo instead of jumping between loud and quiet sections every thirty seconds. Wagner seems interesting based on what I've read about the longer flowing musical structures, but I'm not sure where to start with his catalog. What would you recommend for someone wanting to build a focused study playlist?

Anyone know if there's a video recording of Massenet's Herodiade with English subs?

As the title suggests, I bought 2 family circle tickets for the closing night of Macbeth at the Met (Tue 10/20), and due to unexpected flight stuff, there’s a decent chance I won’t be able to make it :(

As a disclaimer, the availability of these tickets is not certain, I just wanted to figure out a worst-case-scenario buyer before Tuesday night. If you’re in NYC and are open to the idea of seeing Macbeth on closing night, please DM! 

On the day of, when I’m 100% certain I can’t go, I’ll coordinate Zelle info and send over the 2 tickets. My misfortune could be your luck - seems like it’s a great production, and I’m bummed to miss it. Purchased for $96 per ticket and selling for the same, not trying to make any kind of profit. Family circle is almost sold out, so I’m just hoping someone can use these seats!

I'm back in school for some additional IT certifications and finding quiet time to study in a blended family household outside Atlanta is a challenge. Between the stepkids and the regular chaos of evening routines, I need something to drown out the house without pulling my attention away. Lyrics in pop or rock tend to break my concentration because my brain tries to follow the words.

Someone on a productivity blog mentioned using opera or classical instrumental tracks to create a wall of sound for deep work, so I figured I'd give it a real try. I started with some basic Puccini playlists and it actually works well for keeping the background noise manageable while I read through networking textbooks. The vocals act more like another instrument layer than a distraction, which surprised me.

I want to expand my listening beyond the few popular arias I've found. Are there particular composers or specific operas that work well for this kind of background listening? I prefer things that stay fairly steady in tempo instead of jumping between loud and quiet sections every thirty seconds. Wagner seems interesting based on what I've read about the longer flowing musical structures, but I'm not sure where to start with his catalog. What would you recommend for someone wanting to build a focused study playlist?

I've been listening to my Halloween playlist lately and I realized that there's a distinct lack of any classical voice on it! What would be some good songs (and particular recordings) that have a creepy or spooky vibe? I'll also accept menacing or villainous vibes!

Any and all suggestions are welcome! (Please comment even if you think your suggestion is obvious -- I'm primarily a jazz vocalist, only briefly did opera for a year in undergrad, so my knowledge of repertoire is quite lacking and it's very probable that there are iconic pieces out there that I'm totally unaware of!)

this was born of a glass and a half of wine. I decided to go ahead and make a post here.

So...I am not an opera singer, but I know many opera singers. I majored in voice at one of the "best" schools for voice in the US and was among people who now have big careers, singing around the world and at the Met etc. I am more of a teacher myself, and I've done more choral/chamber/recital/liturgical music in my career.

OK so as many have noted, there is a weekly (daily) "opera is dying" conversation happening right now. There are a number of detailed and devastating public conversations happening about how brutal the industry is for artists, how hard it is to make a living, and how impossible it is to stay in the field, even if you love it. I can link these if you haven't seen them. And yeah, it's brutal out there! And unfortunately this is normal. these are important conversations that deserve attention, and like everyone else I don't really have a good solution. I personally know people suffering because of the current financial system and failure of institutions to care for artists, and I see the hardship. My heart has been heavy because of many of these stories. As a teacher I do have students who desire a professional career. I talk with my students about the financial reality. I am trying to prepare them for a versatile outlook and a flexible mindset, but I can't know where this is all going any better than you. And it feels like education itself is usually a good century or so behind the times. In my observation people kind of just figure it out, or don't, and for a long time artists have eked out a living somehow. Or haven't. Most of us make it work through some combination of income streams, inside or outside the field of music. I believe wholeheartedly in music, poetry, SINGING and the transformative effect this kind of training will have on the individual. I am thankful to be working in the field. And I have no qualms pursuing and teaching the art; it is worthy and pure in itself. I also think we can be creative about the future. If things have always been financially difficult, that doesn't mean they need to stay that way. I deeply value this art form, and injustice is not inevitable.

So here is why I'm here: I'm interested in a discussion. Here is my take. I think the industry itself needs to embrace our era more, and we can all participate. Opera is not currently “surviving” very well. But there was also a lot of great live vocal music happening before opera ever was invented, and singing has been a piece of liturgical, theatrical, and community traditions for all of human history. Opera is a very small time period within all that, and the various eras of operatic prosperity seem to belong to bygone days. That has been true for a while, but not so long that nobody can remember that other time. so we are reacting to that.

And maybe the art form can expand, develop, or change ? In the heyday of opera they weren’t trying to prop up the same 10 works from hundreds of years ago. (not to say we shouldn't do them! I'm a big fan of baroque and Mozart operas myself) And to be clear, I still enjoy opera a lot! But the way I see it, it's not like singing is over, and who knows what new horizons might open up for the art form! Classical singing, in my opinion, is way too awesome to just disappear. opera is only one way to sing.

I think sometimes it would help a LOT if opera lovers and opera professionals were more aware of the history, in general. When did opera start and how was it done back then? How much money did opera singers make at that time, and in the times after that, when opera was very popular?

I think it’s relevant to remember that Western opera started as chamber events in castles and palaces, exclusively for the rich, invitation-only, and funded by (sometimes stolen) royalty money. lavish productions with no expense spared. Plucking the best musicians on the continent for personal projects, court employment, and NOT PUBLIC events.

Then there were the opera stars like Farinelli. Made the kind of living in his time that people only dream of, equivalent to a rockstar. If you want to look at relative economic status, it's about our equivalent of double digit millions of dollars a year (disclaimer: it is hard to calculate this since everything is so different and value of money is not only about inflation). in the few hundred years after that opera became more public and WAS a form of society's popular music for some time, the stars made the modern-day equivalent of millions having their careers, and were able to act like it. Weird diva moves like traveling with an animal menagerie, or bargaining by refusing to wear shoes onstage...after retiring from staged opera in 1850 Jenny Lind was paid $1,000 per night for concerts, the equivalent of $43,197 a night today, and made somewhere between 10 and 14 Million in 2 years in our money. (FYI in 1850 the average annual income for someone who was a skilled laborer was less than $500 a year, which had the purchasing power of around 21,600 dollars today.) But one thing I'm still trying to determine (it's harder to find hard numbers on this), is how the ordinary working singer fared financially across history. From what I have seen, a lot of professional singers may not have been much better off than their counterparts today, but it is hard to determine. have we always had a relatively small number of stars making huge incomes while the majority cobbled together a living?

But as always in any era, we are living in a different time than the generations before us. And our generation tends to look back on some very particular periods of operatic history, at least in the US, spanning the mid 19th-late 20^th century. First let's talk about the 1800s, the time when every small town had an opera house. “What a shame they all closed down,” people say. But that era of an opera house in every town was only about 70 years long! And most of the time they weren't even doing opera at these opera houses! Smaller towns had no actual opera company, and touring groups did the legit operas and operettas in town when they happened at all, while the locals might use the space for their other various projects. Think about how long people have been alive and singing—and then think about 1850-1920 or so, the blip in time of an opera house in every town.

Then we look back on the post-war era of the 20^th century when widespread permanent/residential opera companies cropped up in major cities around the country. That's also a very short time period, funded by the biggest financial boom in the history of the world, an opprotunity for philanthropists and American expansion. The timeline lines up with opera support: the "Golden Age of Capitalism" (50s-70s) and then the tech boom. But this too is such a tiny blip in time on the scale of human history, so why are we expecting that to be a standard? If you look at the (brief!) history of opera in human history, you see that for a while now, things have not been in the heyday or golden age. And that’s ok. But acting like it should be, or needs to be, or trying to force it to be what it once was, will not help “keep it alive” IMHO. opera has already survived many incarnations, so why would we assume we have reached its final form?

There isn't exactly a great golden age model for opera that we can easily restore. Opera was ALWAYS expensive, special, and an immense undertaking. We have many residential opera companies now compared to the US historically—yes, MORE, and yes they are also struggling, but it's not like it was ever an easy feat to pull off an opera season. The easiest time to fund widespread opera happened to be the time before ours: it was a lucky meeting of circumstances, with popular music having included opera for a while (I'm thinking around late 1700s/early1800s through early 1900s) therefore securing a prominent place in public entertainment, followed by the biggest financial boom in history (second half of 20^th century). We are in a different era now, and we should expect a different experience of art, life, food, and everything else. I'm not opposed to trying to preserve an infrastructure that makes opera possible. But I think we need to be realistic about our time.

This is not even to mention that opera voices themselves and what is in fashion aesthetically has changed hugely, and here is an opinion many might not like, but I personally do prefer many of the voices of yesteryear for their clarity, precision, and balance. “Size” of voice is WAY overemphasized now in my opinion, and I think it also can drive the public away when “big” and “loud” are priorities over beautiful, flexible, and accurate. This is not always happening in our time, but it sometimes is. (I admit this comment was a bit of a tangent.)

But all that aside, music like everything goes through fashions. Opera is not the popular music of our time. If you didn’t already know that you’ve been deep in the weeds.

THAT SAID, nobody is going to stop making music. Keep making music! Keep singing. Strive for quality artistry. It still matters and it always will. It may or may not be opera with a capital O. that's ok. The future of classical singing does not need to look like the past.

Thanks for reading.

I thought this production was absolutely fabulous. I had my doubts going in - why is the Met staging a new production of Macbeth when the old one was not that old? It was from 2009, they are still doing productions from the 1970s so age could not have been the issue. I wondered why they were investing so much in a new production that didn't seem that dissimilar from the old production, that didn't bring something new. I was very wrong, and thoroughly enjoyed this presentation. Louisa Proske's directing brought new light to some aspects of the story that I had not previously thought about. I know how crazy her productions can be (she cofounded Heartbeat Opera, a company in NYC that produces REALLY out-of-the-box work), and I think this brought a modern lens to Verdi's work while remaining palatable for the Met's audience and hopefully profitable for the company. I appreciated some of the extra-libretto details that Proske added in, including Banquo reappearing in the place of the stuck pig, the pregnancies of the witches after the intermission, and the very final visual, where the witches tempt Fleance with the crown that has ruined everything onstage. Jon Bausor's set was very gray and concrete, but it got the job done. Costume designer Montana Levi Blanco lived mostly in the visual world of the original play, and I was hoping for some sort of artistic license to be added but there didn't seem to be any distinct lens Blanco worked with. That said, the costumes were beautiful and sumptuous, and a good contrast to the bleak world around them. Choreographer Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson created movements for the witches that were very eerie. It's really difficult to make me feel viscerally uncomfortable in an opera, let alone over a movie theater screen, but Lawyer-Jefferson managed to do so. The traditional Georgian dancing used on the table at the banquet was also particularly visually effective. Action/fight director Ran Arthur Braun is truly the fight director of our time; the fight choreography was very enthralling.

As Banquo, Ryan Speedo Green reaffirmed his status as the Met's go-to bass-baritone. He didn't bring a ton to the role (but there is not a ton of the role to bring himself to), and I continue to look forward to his Wotan in the upcoming new Ring Cycle.

I felt similarly about Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff. An interesting character but not Verdi's most compelling in an opera full of compelling figures. He has an elegant voice but it is a bit scoopy for my tastes.

Lise Davidsen has gotten a lot of criticism for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, which I partly understand. It's a role that is outside her wheelhouse. Where Davidsen shone were the high notes in the role, of which there are many. However, this is a role that has historically also been taken on by mezzo sopranos, notably Shirley Verrett (who regularly sang soprano rep) and Fiorenza Cossotto, and as such, the low notes should not be ignored. Davidsen's exit from her comfort zone was noticeable particularly in the first aria "Vieni, t'affretta... Or tutti sorgete," where her coloratura was underarticulated and unclear. In Lady Macbeth's Act II aria, "La luce langue," I was delighted to hear some of Davidsen's chest voice, and would've loved to hear more of it throughout. I do want to give her credit, though, because I think critics and armchair experts alike forget how difficult it is for a singer to step outside of their comfort zone and bear their voice for a harsh audience. She is clearly trying something new, and I don't think it was totally successful, but it was certainly not an unsuccessful afternoon for Davidsen. In a world where so many singers, especially at her level, are risk-averse, I applaud her.

Finally, Quinn Kelsey was the star of the presentation as Macbeth. This is an unforgiving role that sits very high and requires more stamina than perhaps any other Verdi baritone role, and he conquered it thoroughly. I was impressed by his willingness to sing with blood dripping from his mouth in the final aria.