San Francisco Opera Reveals 2025–26 Season Lineup

San Francisco Opera has announced details for the Company's 2025–26 Season. The Company's 103rd season, which marks Shilvock's tenth as general director, kicks off September 5 with an opening weekend celebration under Kim's baton featuring the annual Opera Ball, co-presented with San Francisco Opera Guild, Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto starring acclaimed baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat and Opera in the Park, the free, annual concert at Golden Gate Park in its 50th year.

Keystones of the 2025–26 Season are the world premiere of The Monkey King by composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang, and a new production of Richard Wagner's Parsifal. The Monkey King centers around the mythic hero from China's classic novel Journey to the West, whose popularity has exploded through film, television, animation and, most recently, the 2024 blockbuster video game Black Myth: Wukong.

Eun Sun Kim, San Francisco Opera's Music Director since 2021, continues her journey through the works of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner with Verdi's Rigoletto and, in a brand-new staging by director Matthew Ozawa, Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, along with Strauss' Elektra. Kim also leads the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and mezzo-soprano soloist Daniela Mack in a special one-night-only concert featuring the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Manuel de Falla. Kim's ongoing collaboration with the Company is the subject of the recent 60-minute film Eun Sun Kim: A Journey Into Lohengrin by Lumahai Productions and San Francisco Opera.

San Francisco Opera commemorates its legacy of commissioning and presenting new operas with a 25th-anniversary presentation of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's Dead Man Walking. Commissioned by San Francisco Opera and premiered in October 2000, Dead Man Walking is the most widely performed new opera of the last 25 years.

San Francisco Opera's 2025–26 Season culminates in Summer 2026 with Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville (Il Barbiere di Siviglia) with two brilliant casts, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's monumental Elektra, a Pride Concert celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community and the continuation of the Company's popular Encounter series with The Barber of Seville Encounter.

Chorus Director John Keene prepares the artists of the San Francisco Opera Chorus for the operas of the 2025–26 Season and leads them in a Chorus Concert at the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater on November 23. The Company's resident artists, the Adler Fellows, will have their annual showcase with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra on November 21 at Herbst Theatre.

General Director Matthew Shilvock said: “Bringing two epic new productions to life simultaneously is an incredible affirmation of the Company's talents across so many disciplines and the community's support for large-scale creativity. A new Parsifal is a major undertaking for any opera company and to be doing it with the leadership of Eun Sun Kim and Matthew Ozawa promises to be a sublime experience. With The Monkey King and Dead Man Walking we celebrate the Company's historic commitment to storytelling that makes a difference. And the whole season is filled with artistry that affirms the Bay Area as one of the great cultural centers of the world. I'm very excited for what lies ahead!”

Music Director Eun Sun Kim said: “Several of opera's great masterpieces make up our 2025–26 Season. The opener, Rigoletto, was considered by Verdi himself to be his best opera, and Parsifal returns to our stage for the first time in 25 years. Wagner labored for many years on his final work, but the musical language and storytelling in Parsifal are so advanced that when we do our job in the pit it is a theatrical experience like no other. Elektra marks a transition for Richard Strauss from the melodic language in his early tone poems to an expansive instrumentation of vast harmonic possibility. The opera is so demanding, especially for the singers, and I am very happy to be conducting this first Elektra of my career with my orchestra and such a wonderful cast.

“The San Francisco Opera Orchestra and I customarily work together in the orchestra pit, but these musicians, due to their vast experience, can also command the stage. In our fall concert, the Orchestra will do just that in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. We will also perform music by Manuel de Falla who across national and language barriers absorbed Beethoven's influence, even citing the famous ‘fate' motif from the Fifth Symphony in his ballet. Falla's lovely song cycle will feature the beautiful voice of Daniela Mack.”

The 2025–26 Season celebrates the Company's commitment to new works with the world premiere of a new opera, The Monkey King, and an anniversary revival of a past commission, Dead Man Walking.

San Francisco Opera has long been a home for new operas, beginning in the 1920s during the Company's first decade when Puccini's still-new works Il Trittico and Turandot were featured. The Company has presented the American premieres of operas by composers including Maurice Ravel (L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, 1930), Francis Poulenc (Dialogues of the Carmelites, 1957), Richard Strauss (Die Frau ohne Schatten, 1958), Benjamin Britten (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1961), Olivier Messiaen (Saint François d'Assise, 2002), György Ligeti (Le Grand Macabre, 2004) and Kaija Saariaho (Innocence, 2024).

Since its first commissioned opera in 1961 (Norman Dello Joio's Blood Moon), San Francisco Opera has worked to expand the operatic repertoire with more than 30 new commissions and co-commissions by leading composers and librettists, such as:
 

• Jake Heggie's first opera, Dead Man Walking (2000), and Three Decembers (2008), Moby-Dick (2012) and It's a Wonderful Life (2018).
• Berkeley-based composer John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer (1992), Doctor Atomic (2005), Girls of the Golden West (2017) and, most recently, Antony and Cleopatra (2022), which opened San Francisco Opera's Centennial Season.
• The late Kaija Saariaho's final opera, Innocence (2024), exploring the events leading up to and the aftermath of a school shooting.
• Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels' Omar (2023), about West African Islamic scholar Omar ibn Said who wrote his life story while living under slavery in 19th-century America.
• Composer Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell's The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (2023), with the composer performing in the pit with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.
• The Company's first Spanish-language opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego (2023) by Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz, about iconic artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
• Bright Sheng and David Henry Hwang's Dream of the Red Chamber (2016), like The Monkey King, based on one of the four great classic Chinese novels.
• Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter (2008) with scenes set in Beijing, Hong Kong and San Francisco.
• Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton's Appomattox (2007), about the meeting between Generals Grant and Lee that brought the American Civil War to a close.
• Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie's Harvey Milk (1996), about the first openly gay member of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.

San Francisco Opera's recently relaunched performance database (archive.sfopera.com) contains complete cast and production details for the above works and others, illustrating San Francisco Opera's engagement with 20th- and 21st-century opera creators throughout a history of more than 100 years.

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