Blog: Why This Opera Now?
Joseph Li, VP, Artistic
2025-2026 Season
Who are we underneath the mask?
From the perfect personas we present on social media to the lies we tell ourselves and those closest to us, we go to great lengths to control how others perceive us – all narrative noise designed to bury the truth about who we really are.
To perform a role in opera is to knowingly wear a disguise: a performer takes on not just someone’s appearance but their life story, along with every idiosyncrasy that makes them unique. It is only fitting, then, that MN Opera’s 2025-2026 season sings stories of people like us who must decide to either shed their masks and reveal their true selves in all their strength and brokenness or maintain the façade. Each one of these stories can give us the courage to pierce through our own fear of who we really are.
Così fan tutte (November 1-9, 2025)
Is our love true—or is it just for show?
We begin our season with one of the best ways to start shedding our masks: laughing at ourselves.
The story of two couples having their relationships tested by comedic, self-sabotaging masquerade seems like slapstick comedy—but underneath, it holds a mirror to the ways we manage to screw up our closest relationships. The disguises Ferrando and Guglielmo use to trick their lovers (goaded by Despina and Don Alfonso) serve as Mozart and Da Ponte’s commentary on the lengths we go to prove a point of pride—or to win over someone’s heart. Mozart’s music in Act II particularly reveals moments of self-doubt and vulnerability that are all too real for anyone who has second-guessed their own capacities for love and authenticity.
In our telling of Così fan tutte, the audience will have input in how the story ends, voting between multiple different endings. The mirror we typically hold to our audience becomes even more real when they help decide the outcome.
My Name is Florence (January 31-February 8, 2026)
Who was Florence Price, beyond the music?
We can learn from those who have transcended their masks.
The first work presented through Minnesota Opera’s latest New Works Initiative, My Name is Florence, tells the story of prominent American composer Florence Price, who was the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major U.S. orchestra.
My Name is Florence is aptly positioned in the middle of our season—while Così fan tutte and Pagliacci explore the theme of masks and disguises from a respective comedic and tragic angle, composer B.E. Boykin and librettist Harrison David Rivers have sought to break this mold. In the words of the character Granny, Florence “transcends” them entirely. Granny recounts staying out of the sun to preserve her lighter skin color, which presents a quandary to Florence: should she use her lighter skin to her advantage as an artist or reject the problems of colorism that this might raise?
Florence Price’s experience with masks stands apart from our other characters’ stories this season. In one scene she writes a letter to a symphony conductor, asking him to program her work while making disclaimers for “the handicap of race” and having “Negro blood in my veins.” This disclaimer is her costume and her mask, not a public persona or profession of value. It is her commentary on the industry’s backwards expectations of being perceived as acceptable and worth hearing as a Black woman.
My Name is Florence closes with the trio of leading women representing three generations of Florence Price’s family proclaiming their love for the sun – a powerful and cathartic inspiration for all of us to embrace our authentic selves.
Our final two offerings of the 2025-2026 season showcase the power of verismo opera (Italian: “realism”), which is a style of musical storytelling that focuses less on legends of old and instead on characters whose life experiences more closely reflect our own journeys, along with the unglamorous and often brutal realities of our everyday lives.
Edgar in Concert (April 17 & 19, 2026)
Can one choice change everything?
Edgar leads a double life, trapped like so many of us in social constructs dominated by moral and ideological rigidity. Caught between an ideal of virtue and the reality of his impulses, his solution to this problem involves disguising himself to test the loyalty of others. Edgar’s ultimate inability to own who he is behind that disguise holds an uncomfortable mirror to our own weakness and the often-resulting tragic consequences.
Despite Puccini’s own dissatisfaction with his very early work, Edgar still yielded beautiful and imaginative music that underscored the moral dichotomy in both the story’s individual characters and in the mob.
This rarely-performed opera will be presented in concert, only the second U.S. performance in decades.
Pagliacci (May 9-17, 2026)
The show must go on, but how?
Pagliacci (Clowns) by Ruggero Leoncavallo hits close to home for both artists and audiences who have experienced tremendous performance pressure in public under the weight of enormous personal tragedy and upheaval.
Leoncavallo’s “Vesti la giubba” (“Put on the costume”), which Canio sings at the end of the first act, has made widespread appearances in popular culture to underscore this theme of donning masks to hide one’s identity from the world. The two-dimensional view of Canio relegates him to opera’s long list of villains—after all, he is an abusive husband, a tyrannical boss, and eventually murders two people, including his wife. Yet as Canio sobs through his aria while putting on his clown makeup in front of the mirror, Leoncavallo’s wrought and emotional musical score puts a mirror in front of us and forces us to reckon with our own pain and its power to either humanize or dehumanize us.
We hope you’ll join us for a season of laughter, longing, and discovery. Single tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, September 9 and subscriptions are available at mnopera.org/subscribenow.