Search

Based on Victor Hugo's famous play The King is Amusing, Rigoletto helped make Verdi an operatic icon. The Met hosts a new production of this ruthless tragedy, set in a hushed, Art Deco Europe of the 1920s, with baritone Quinn Kelsey leading the cast in the commanding title role.

The Story
At a costume ball, the jester Rigoletto humiliates guests who are victims of the shameless seducer Duke of Mantua. To make him pay for his mockery, Rigoletto's enemies set out to capture his daughter Gilda, whom they believe to be his mistress. When the jester realizes that he has been the target of an evil trick, he decides to take revenge with the help of the brigand Sparafucile.

The Met's first new production since 1969 of Strauss's rich romantic masterpiece is conducted by Music Director James Levine and directed by Robert Carsen, whose most recent Met production was the hit 2013 staging of Falstaff.

Following the rapturous response to his last opera, The Tempest, the Met presents the American premiere of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, inspired by the classic Luis Buñuel film of the same name. Hailed by the New York Times at its 2016 Salzburg Festival premiere as “inventive and audacious … a major event,” The Exterminating Angel is a surreal fantasy about a dinner party from which the guests can’t escape. Tom Cairns, who wrote the libretto, directs the new production, and Adès conducts his own adventurous new opera.