The newly announced season will open September 27, 2021, with the Met premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones (pictured above)—the first opera by an African American composer to be performed at the Met—with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow. The opera will be conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and will star Angel Blue, Latonia Moore, and Will Liverman.
Blanchard’s opera is one of three contemporary works to have premieres in 2021–22, the greatest number of new operas to premiere in a single Met season since 1928–29. The other new works are Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, set to a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, also conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and starring Erin Morley in the title role, and Brett Dean’s Hamlet, with a libretto by Matthew Jocelyn and with Allan Clayton as the tortured Dane. The season also features new productions of Verdi’s Rigoletto, starring Rosa Feola, Piotr Beczała, and Quinn Kelsey, and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, with Nadine Sierra in the title role, opposite Javier Camarena. The Met premiere of the original five-act, French-language version of Verdi’s Don Carlos will also have Nézet-Séguin on the podium leading an all-star cast: Sonya Yoncheva, Elīna Garanča, Matthew Polenzani, Etienne Dupuis, Günther Groissböck, and John Relyea.