Nightly Opera Streams, May 3–9

Celebrate Mother’s Day with a week of free streams showcasing some of the best—and worst—operatic moms. Explore the full lineup with this guide.

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

Joyce DiDonato discusses the mixture of ruthless political machinations and black comedy that makes Handel’s Agrippina—in which she plays the title role of the notorious Roman empress—so fascinating and rewarding.

An ordinary soldier is driven to madness and murder by an intolerable cocktail of humiliation, jealousy, and the indignities of daily life. Learn more about Berg's Wozzeck with our In Focus podcast.

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.

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.

As he prepared to conduct Patrice Chéreau’s explosive staging of Elektra in 2016, Esa-Pekka Salonen explained how Strauss’s liminal 20th-century masterpiece blends musical styles.

Marcello Giordani, who passed away in October 2019 and is featured in this week’s stream of  Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, was one of the Met’s brightest star tenors in recent decades.

Before headlining the 2010 new production of Hamlet, which returned Ambroise Thomas’s Shakespeare adaptation to the Met after a nearly 100-year absence, baritone Simon Keenlyside discussed singing the opera’s brooding title character.

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.

A clash of cultures and the heartless abandonment of a naïve young Japanese geisha lead to one of opera’s most devastating and emotionally direct tragedies. Learn more about Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with our In Focus podcast.

Take a look back at some of Renée Fleming’s most powerful appearances in the company’s The Met: Live in HD series.

Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, one of opera’s great singing actors, added another chapter to his Met legacy in 2019 with his role debut as the title character of Berg’s Wozzeck.

Puppeteers Kevin Augustine, Tom Lee, and Jonothon Lyons explain how they breathe life into the puppet that acts as Cio-Cio-San’s child in Anthony Minghella’s elegant and heartbreaking production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

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.

Puccini’s beloved tragedy had its Met premiere in 1907 and has since starred numerous legendary sopranos in the title role. And though the company has performed the work nearly 900 times, it has presented only five different productions.

Visionary set and costume designer John Macfarlane’s versatile aesthetic was on display in two very different new productions during the 2019–20 season, Handel’s Agrippina and Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander, the former of which streams this week.

In a conversation with Met General Manager Peter Gelb, director William Kentridge and Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin discuss how they aim to amplify the musical and dramatic themes of Berg’s masterpiece Wozzeck.

Learn more about Handel’s searing political satire, which had its Met premiere during the 2019–20 season.

With its deep Freudian undercurrents, Strauss’s incendiary Elektra, inspired by Greek myth, is as modern now as it was at its premiere more than a century ago.

Han Feng, who created the costumes for the Met’s production of Madama Butterfly, explains how she went from being a successful fashion designer to working with director Anthony Minghella on his celebrated staging.

Patrice Chéreau’s humanistic 2016 Met production of Strauss’s Elektra—featuring the great Nina Stemme in the title role—revealed the psychological depth and family drama at the heart of a work that is much more than a simple, violent tale of revenge.

South African artist and director William Kentridge has been responsible for three of the Met’s most thought-provoking productions in recent years—including the company’s first new staging of Berg’s Wozzeck in more than 20 years.

During the 2019–20 season, the Met presented Agrippina for the first time, in a pointed production by Sir David McVicar that amplified the work’s satirical relevance.

Strauss’s overwhelming one-act opera has a limited but distinguished history at the Met, thanks largely to a series of great artists on the podium and in the title role.

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. 

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