Nightly Opera Streams, November 2–8

The lineup for this first week of our tour through opera history begins with Handel, the master of Baroque opera, and concludes 150 years later with Wagner’s monumental style of music drama, This tour guide will help you track the stylistic evolutions that can be observed along the way.

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

While the company hadn’t presented an opera by Handel before 1984, in recent years, the composer’s works have appeared with increasing frequency on the Met stage.

The Greek Orpheus myth has served as a subject for a number of operatic adaptations, including Gluck’s elegant Orfeo ed Euridice, whose history at the Met stretches back to the company’s earliest seasons.

After languishing in obscurity for some 200 years, Mozart’s early masterpiece finally assumed its rightful place in the repertory in the late 20th century, including at the Met, where it has enjoyed numerous successful runs with outstanding casts.

Arguably the most famous opera singer of her day, soprano Adelina Patti only gave 12 performances with the Met, including in the title role in the company premiere of Rossini’s Semiramide.

The operas of Giuseppe Verdi have been performed around 5,700 times at the Metropolitan Opera, more than those of any other composer by a wide margin.

Drawn from every era of operatic composition, from the Baroque to the modern day, a wide array of enthralling French works have appeared on the Met stage.

From an early vogue in the 1890s to a revival of popularity in recent decades, learn about the Met history of Gounod’s soaring Shakespeare adaptation.

Learn about the storied history of Wagner’s operas at the Met, from the house’s opening season in 1883 to the present day.

As she prepared to reprise her portrayal of the title heroine of Handel’s dramatic opera, soprano Renée Fleming explained why the composer continues to seize audiences’ imaginations.

Joyce DiDonato speaks with director and choreographer Mark Morris about his elegant staging of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, in which a chorus of historic characters bears witness to the transformative power of love.

Mozart masterfully and simultaneously reveals the turbulent and conflicting emotions of his leading characters in this Act III quartet from Idomeneo.

Learn how dozens of talented backstage wizards spent months refurbishing the sets and costumes of Semiramide before the opera returned to the Met stage in 2018.

Learn about one of the greatest voices in Met history—the legendary soprano Leontyne Price, who stars in this week’s stream of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, in a telecast from 1984.

Superstar soprano Anna Netrebko has appeared in more Live in HD transmissions than any other principal artist. Watch highlights from a dozen of her roles, including this week’s stream of Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.

With a collaboration spanning 60 productions together—including 11 at the Met—few artists had a greater impact on the world of opera during the second half of the 20th century than director Otto Schenk and scenic designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen.

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