Nightly Opera Streams, May 17–23

Thrilling trills, hair-raising high notes, and death-defying descents into madness abound with the next week of free Nightly Opera Streams. Explore the electrifying lineup with this guide.

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

Few operatic conventions are more thrilling to behold than the “mad scene,” and the one in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is definitive.

French soprano Natalie Dessay is Amina, the sleepwalking heroine of Bellini’s La Sonnambula, in this exquisite aria from the opera’s second act.

Discover some of the great divas who have thrilled and terrified Met audiences with their mad scenes over the past half-century.

Donizetti’s riveting bel canto showcase for virtuoso coloratura sopranos has been a consistent presence in the Met repertory since the company’s very first season, with several legendary artists singing the title role.

According to director Stephen Wadsworth, Mussorgsky’s epic tsarist masterwork Boris Godunov contains three intertwined sagas. In this 2010 video about his production, he describes the opera’s historical and human dimensions.

Throwing herself wholly into every role she played, French soprano Natalie Dessay was one of the Met’s most magnetic artists for more than two decades.

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

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.

A highlight of last spring’s At-Home Gala, the Met Orchestra and Chorus came together through nearly 100 individually recorded videos to perform “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

An unparalleled showcase for the bass taking on the title role, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov has brought a long line of legendary stars to the Met stage.

The extraordinary and beloved Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died in 2017, is featured in this week’s stream of Verdi’s La Traviata.

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.

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