Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, will extend his contract and lead Wagner’s four-opera epic, in a production staged by Yuval Sharon.
Yannick Nezet-Seguin gestures to an orchestra while conducting.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the Metropolitan Opera. He has been the company’s music director since 2018 and will stay in the role until 2030.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Javier C. Hernández
By Javier C. Hernández
Aug. 6, 2024, 12:00 p.m. ET
Wagner’s “Ring” cycle is a mammoth undertaking for any opera company: a four-opera, 15-hour epic that features a cast of warriors, gods, giants and dwarves and some of the most daunting music in the repertoire.
The Metropolitan Opera said on Tuesday that it would again stage opera’s most ambitious work, starting in the 2027-28 season, the company’s first new production of the “Ring” cycle in nearly two decades. And a familiar face will be on the podium: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director since 2018, who is extending his contract through 2030.
The production, which will be staged by the visionary theater director Yuval Sharon, is to feature the soprano Lise Davidsen, one of opera’s brightest stars, as Brünnhilde.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said the company had decided to stage a new “Ring” in part for Nézet-Séguin.
“Every music director of a major opera company expects and deserves to have a ‘Ring’ cycle,” he said. “It’s the crowning achievement, the biggest thing you can do in opera.”
Nézet-Séguin, 49, whose new contract covers a six-year term, said he was looking forward to the “Ring,” calling it an “extremely intimate affair.”
“It’s fantastic and it’s phenomenal and it’s vast,” he said, “but the core of it, the heart of it, is something that’s very secretive.”
While the concept is still evolving, the Met’s “Ring” will not be grounded in a specific time or place, Nézet-Séguin said. It will explore “folklore or legends that are everywhere in the world, not only in the Western world, and not only in the colonialist world,” he said.
“I want to emphasize the universality of the message,” he said. “We’re trying to make people realize that even nations that traditionally were not related to opera can actually relate to this ‘Ring’ cycle.”
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Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Detroit Opera, will stage the “Ring” cycle at the Met.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
Sharon, 44, who is the artistic director at Detroit Opera as well as a leader of Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles, is considered one of the field’s most inventive directors. In 2018, he became the first American director to stage a production at Bayreuth, the festival in Germany that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago.
Sharon brought a 36-foot-diameter orb into Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles for “Atlas,” an opera by Meredith Monk. In a Cleveland staging of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” he had singers’ heads pop out of a wall of animation.
Sharon will make his Met debut in the 2025-26 season with another Wagner opera: a new production of “Tristan und Isolde” that will also feature Davidsen and be led by Nézet-Séguin, the company said. Sharon said in a statement that it was the “honor of a lifetime” to come to the Met.
“Wagner’s works are opera’s equivalent to Homer or Shakespeare,” he said. “Each opera is its own complex cosmos, with endless potential for reinterpretation.”
This is the Met’s second new production of the “Ring” since Gelb took over as general manager in 2006. The first, a 2010 version directed by Robert Lepage, has a fraught history. A 45-ton machine that was the centerpiece of the set was notoriously noisy and prone to glitches. That “Ring” received mixed reviews and cost the Met more than $16 million.
Gelb said he expected Sharon’s “Ring” to be substantially less extravagant. “I don’t imagine this new ‘Ring’ being anything on the scale of costs of the Lepage ‘Ring,’” he said.
The Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, has been dealing with serious fiscal challenges recently. It has withdrawn about $70 million in emergency funds from its endowment over the past two seasons to help cover costs.
Gelb selected Sharon after an extensive search over several years. He had also considered existing “Ring” productions by Richard Jones, Barrie Kosky and Stefan Herheim. He became increasingly convinced that it would be hard to share the “Ring” with another company.
“Each of these directors has their own signature approach to things, and each one is brilliant,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it made me realize that we should just create a ‘Ring’ for the Met.”
Nézet-Séguin said that with his contract extended he would continue to champion works by living composers. He will lead “The Highlands” by Carlos Simon, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” by Gabriela Lena Frank and “Lincoln in the Bardo” by Missy Mazzoli, among others. He will also conduct a new staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” by Robert Carsen.
Nézet-Séguin, who also leads the Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal, rejected criticism that he has not been as present at the Met as he should be. He conducts four or five of the 18 operas the Met stages each season.
“I give my 200 percent at all times, everywhere,” he said. “I’ve never felt better in my life, and I’ve never felt more energized.”
He said he admired the Met’s musicians “even more than I did when I signed up.”
“We’re just getting started,” he said. “We need to continue the journey.”
Javier C. Hernández reports on classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond. More about Javier C. Hernández
See more on: Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb
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