When Opera Companies Team Up, Everybody Wins

New York Times

20-05-2025

Simon McBurney's acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky's 'Khovanshchina,' which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn't happen.
McBurney's staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.
At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney's 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. 'For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,' he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg's picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of 'Khovanshchina' at the festival, on April 21.
'Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it's over,' he said. 'This is an artistic waste and economic waste.'
In recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams's 'Antony and Cleopatra,' is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,' a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon's novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, 'La Sonnambula' and Kaija Saariaho's 'Innocence,' are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.
A majority of recent Met co-productions played elsewhere before arriving in New York. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager says he's fine with letting others go first.
'Much as when Verdi was writing his operas, they were usually, if not always, better the second or third time around,' Gelb said in a phone interview. He explained that unlike shows on Broadway, opera does not enjoy the benefit of previews: 'So very often, we don't see a work in its entirety until the final dress rehearsal, and at that point you can't make any changes other than minor technical ones.'
'Particularly in the case of new operas, even ones that we've commissioned ourselves,' Gelb added, 'I deliberately made arrangements with other companies so they might have the glory of the world premiere, but the Met has the benefit of what we learn from that premiere.'
This strategy has allowed the Met to bring in more productions without bearing the full cost or risk alone. A co-production costs on average $2 million, or half of what it would take for the Met to stage a work on its own, Gelb said. (This figure does not include running costs or, in the case of a new opera, the additional expenses a commission entails.)
But not every opera or every staging makes sense as a collaboration. Serge Dorny, general director of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, called co-productions increasingly essential for lesser-known works and for particularly complex stagings that would be logistically or economically difficult to schedule past their premiere runs.
'If a title is not a repertoire piece and, therefore, you know that the life within the house is going to be short or fragmented, a co-production is interesting,' Dorny said in a recent interview in Munich. Such was the case with one of the most acclaimed recent productions at his house: Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2023 staging of Prokofiev's 'War and Peace,' which was shared with the Liceu.
More recently, the Barcelona company signed on to co-produce the Bayerische Staatsoper's new 'Ring' cycle, directed by Tobias Kratzer. Titles like these, Dorny said, make sense as co-productions, rather than the 'Bohèmes' and the 'Traviatas' that are an opera company's bread and butter.
In 2023, the Bayerische Staatsoper debuted Claus Guth's production of Handel's 'Semele,' which will be seen at the Met in a future season. Dorny said that Gelb and his team were involved with 'Semele' from a very early stage and were able to raise questions about anything they felt might be challenging to reproduce on the Met's stage.
'My intuition is that it will work very well at the Met,' Guth said in a phone interview. 'Because I planned it in huge images, visually. It has aspects of a show that is already imagined for distance.'
Another place where 'Semele' will travel is the Dutch National Opera. The Amsterdam company has co-produced or shared numerous productions with the Met in the past, including William Kentridge's 'Lulu,' McBurney's 'Die Zauberflöte' and Tcherniakov's 'Prince Igor.' Later this year, Tcherniakov will return to stage Tchaikovsky's rarely seen 'The Maid of Orleans,' which is destined for the Met in a future season.
In a video interview, Sophie de Lint, the Dutch company's director, said co-productions were environmentally necessary, not merely financially expedient. 'We're doing a lot of webinars now to share knowledge,' she said in a phone interview, adding that she has a 'sustainability officer' who conducts a 'life-cycle analysis' for new stagings. The goal, she said, is to help determine how to share stagings efficiently, for example, by developing standardized support systems for the sets and modular solutions so that fewer of the moving parts required for a production 'have to be built every time or shipped every time.'
Another important consideration, de Lint added, is that opera stages come in many sizes. 'It's a pity when we have to say, 'Sorry, but the project is too big and not compatible,'' she explained.
Such was the assessment with Stefan Herheim's 2013 production of Richard Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' at the summertime Salzburg Festival. Plans to bring it to the Met hit a snag when the original sets proved unusable, owing to differences in size between the two venues.
'Khovanshchina' was carefully planned for both houses. In Salzburg, the wide proscenium of the Grosses Festspielhaus — over 90 feet long — was narrowed using black side curtains.
'The whole evening was a revelation,' Gelb said of opening night. 'Before I left Salzburg, I met with Simon and told him I wanted to do it right away,' he said, adding that Esa-Pekka Salonen would conduct the Met performances, which are planned for the 2026-27 season.
Gelb called the collaboration 'a good symbiotic relationship' with the potential to add to the Met's luster. 'Word of mouth and news reports and so forth that come out of Salzburg only whet the appetite of the American operatic public,' he said.
'It only stimulates excitement,' he added, 'if something is seen as a success abroad before it comes to New York.'