The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2026-27 season on 22 September 2026 with a new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” staged by the director Louisa Proske and conducted by the company’s music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The evening doubled as the company’s traditional opening-night gala, one of the most prominent dates in New York’s cultural calendar.
At the centre of the staging were the baritone Quinn Kelsey in the title role and the soprano Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth, two singers with the vocal weight Verdi’s score demands. Proske’s production leaned into the opera’s atmosphere of ambition and dread, framing the Scottish tragedy as a study of a marriage undone by power rather than a straightforward pageant of witches and prophecy. Verdi’s early masterpiece, with its sleepwalking scene and its choruses of murderers and apparitions, gives both principals long stretches of unaccompanied psychological exposure.
Critical response was mixed. Reviewing the opening for OperaWire, Francisco Salazar wrote that Kelsey “delivered a committed performance as a weak and vulnerable Macbeth,” carrying the evening even as other elements drew a cooler reception. Davidsen’s assumption of one of the repertory’s most testing soprano roles was among the night’s most closely watched turns.
Opening night at the Met is as much a social occasion as a musical one, and the gala drew the mix of donors, public figures and press that traditionally fills Lincoln Center for the season’s first curtain. The company has leaned on such evenings to sustain attention and philanthropy at a time when reports have pointed to financial pressure and a leaner schedule across the house.
Choosing “Macbeth” to launch the year placed one of Verdi’s darkest works at the front of the season, a bet on dramatic intensity over spectacle. For the Met, the opening sets the tone for the months ahead, and for opera more broadly it is a reminder that the art form’s biggest stage still commands a global audience whenever it raises the curtain. Whatever the reviews conclude, an opening night at the house remains one of the few moments when opera reliably reaches beyond its core audience and into the wider cultural conversation.
