Nightly Opera Streams, Week 3 (March 30–April 5)

Not sure where to start with this week’s Nightly Opera Streams? This guide will introduce you to the productions featured in the upcoming days and get you ready to enjoy every minute of the operatic action.

View the Playbills from the original performance dates for each stream, including synopses, program notes, and more.

In April 2020, Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and tenor Roberto Alagna joined General Manager Peter Gelb for a virtual panel discussion about Verdi’s Don Carlo and their personal and musical lives during the pandemic.

On the occasion of the 2011 Met premiere of John Adams’s Nixon in China, one journalist recalled his experience on the history-making 1972 visit that inspired the opera.

Meet the adorable four-legged star of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia in this backstage interview with a donkey named Sir Gabriel—and his trainer, Nancy Novograd.

Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece is an unsurpassed showcase for vocal virtuosity, especially for the sopranos who dare to tackle the fearsome title role. Learn about some of the great artists who have taken on the challenge at the Met over the last 130 years.

Explore Lady Macbeth’s legendary sleepwalking scene with soprano Anna Netrebko.

The Met’s Dialogues des Carmélites production by John Dexter is one of the company’s most successful and admired stagings. Learn about how it came to be.

Penny Woolcock’s spectacular production of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles, which premiered in 2015, enlisted projection designers and acrobats to conjure the opera’s evocative aquatic setting. Learn more about the stunning diving sequences in this behind-the-scenes video.

Hear directly from Juan Diego Flórez and Peter Mattei, stars of the Live in HD performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, about what it takes to make Rossini’s music sing.

Director Nicholas Hytner explains why Don Carlo is the “quintessential Verdi opera” and discusses his monumental staging, which premiered at the Met in 2010.

The Met’s compelling production of Verdi’s Macbeth is infused with the Shakespearean expertise of director Adrian Noble, onetime leader of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company.

Composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars discuss the historical events that informed Adams's spellbinding modern opera, Nixon in China, and Sellars’s 2011 Met-premiere production. 

Amid the chaos of the French Revolution, an order of nuns commit the ultimate act of martyrdom, giving opera one of its most devastating and unforgettable final scenes. Learn more about Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites with our In Focus podcast.

Resources from the Met’s education department are available for many of the operas featured in this streaming series. Designed for use in the classroom, they are perfect for parents whose kids are now learning from home, or for anyone who’d like to know more about opera.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin brought his first season as Met Music Director to a close with Dialogues des Carmélites in May 2019. As he prepared to lead Poulenc’s powerful opera of faith and martyrdom, he spoke about what makes this masterpiece of 20th-century music unique.

Verdi’s Don Carlo is today widely considered one of the composer’s finest achievements, but it was not always so. Learn about the opera’s long road to recognition at the Met.

The Met’s 2017 new production of Norma lavished Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece with an exceptional cast and evocative visuals. In this video, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and director Sir David McVicar discuss the work’s transcendent music and the production’s depiction of druidic history. 

Diana Damrau, who starred as Leïla in the 2015 premiere of Penny Woolcock’s production of Les Pêcheurs de Perles, explains why Bizet’s heroine is stronger than she seems.

Baritone Željko Lučić has sung many of Verdi’s greatest roles at the Met, including the title character of Macbeth, which he has sung with the company in three different seasons. In this interview preceding the 2019 revival, he spoke about his evolving view of the character and his devotion to Verdi’s music.

In 2014, Anna Netrebko made her sensational Met role debut as Lady Macbeth. In this backstage interview from the Live in HD transmission, host Anita Rachvelishvili asks the soprano about her approach to the fiery antiheroine.

Before taking on the formidable title role of Norma, a powerful Druid priestess struggling to balance her public and personal identities, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky spoke about her character and her career—and the connections between the two.