The Met Opera Announces Its 2025-26 Season

The Metropolitan Opera, which has championed contemporary opera in recent years as it works to attract new audiences, announced on Wednesday that it would bring three modern titles to its stage in the 2025-26 season.

The company will open the season in September with the New York City premiere of Mason Bates’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” an opera based on the 2000 novel of that name by Michael Chabon, which was first heard at Indiana University last fall. The lineup also includes local premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, “Innocence,” from 2021, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” from 2022.

There will be new stagings of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Yuval Sharon, in his company debut; Bellini’s “I Puritani,” for the annual New Year’s Eve gala; and Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón and featuring the soprano Nadine Sierra. Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Bizet’s “Carmen,” Strauss’s “Arabella” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier.”

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will conduct the new productions of “The Amazing Adventures,” “El Último Sueño” and “Tristan.”

The company’s embrace of contemporary opera, which its leaders have said is necessary to overcome serious financial pressures, with the belief that newer works sell better than the classics, has had mixed results. Attendance has averaged about 70 percent of capacity so far this season, compared with 73 percent at the same point last season. (Still, the Met said that it expected to reach an average of 75 percent capacity by the end of the season.)

“It’s impossible to predict hits,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “On the other hand, if we don’t promote new works, then we’re saying goodbye to the art form.”