Dead Man Walking

These performances and the entirety of the 2020–21 season have been CANCELED based on the advice of health officials who advise the Met and Lincoln Center. For more information and to review your options if you purchased tickets for any of these dates, read the complete announcement.

American composer Jake Heggie’s 21st-century masterpiece, the most widely performed new opera of the last 20 years, has its highly anticipated Met premiere, in Ivo van Hove’s second new staging of the season. Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir about her fight for the soul of a condemned murderer, Dead Man Walking matches the high drama of its subject with Heggie’s beautiful and poignant music and a brilliant libretto by Tony and Emmy Award–winner Terrence McNally. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on the podium for this landmark premiere, with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato starring as Helen Prejean. The outstanding cast also features baritone Etienne Dupuis as the condemned Joseph De Rocher, soprano Latonia Moore as Sister Rose, and legendary mezzo-soprano Susan Graham—who sang Prejean in the opera’s 2000 premiere—as De Rocher’s mother.

Music by Jake Heggie, libretto by Terrence McNally

Based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean

Production a gift of Ann and Gordon Getty, Ted Snowdon & Leon “Duffy” Violante, in memory of Terrence McNally, the Rosalie J. Coe Weir Endowment Fund, and Diane B. Wilsey

Additional funding from The Walter and Leonore Annenberg Endowment Fund, The H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, PhD. and Oscar Tang Endowment Fund, Franci Neely, and Denise Littlefield Sobel, in memory of Phyllis Cannon Wattis.