What’s next in American opera? The 2024–2025 season offers a variety of operas large and small as companies around the country continue to prioritize the creation and development of new works. This season shows a continued focus on bringing Black stories to the stage, particularly stories of Black history and Black joy. Plus, opera is once again finding the funny as companies commission comedies and satires after years dominated by premieres of dramas and tragedies. There is also a cluster of new, more intimate chamber operas exploring family relationships. Below is a selection of upcoming premieres this season. For a complete list of performances, visit the National Opera Calendar.

Black History, Black Joy

Imagine waiting more than 130 years for an opera premiere. In January, OperaCréole in New Orleans in collaboration with Washington D.C.’s Opera Lafayette will perform the never-before-seen Morgiane, ou, Le sultan d’Ispahan, created in 1887 by librettist Louis Brunet and composer Edmond Dédé, the first American-born Black composer to complete a large-scale operatic work. The narrative borrows characters from the Ali Baba stories and follows a bold woman who stands up to a sultan for herself and her daughter.

Founded by the mother-and-daughter team of Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason, OperaCréole brings rare classical repertoire of 19^th-century New Orleanian composers of color to the stage. Joseph says she sees Dédé as “a true example of a person determined to be who he was born to be and to achieve his goals.” OperaCréole will present the semi-staged premiere in New Orleans in January, followed by a concert premiere in collaboration with Opera Lafayette in Washington D.C. in February. Subsequent performances will take place in New York and Maryland. “This is the most important piece of American music that no one has ever heard,” says Opera Lafayette’s Patrick Dupre Quigley, conductor and artistic director designate.

Seattle Opera, too, turns to a tale of the past with the world premiere of Jubilee, a compilation of Negro spirituals forged into an opera by Tazewell Thompson. This opera chronicles the path and legacy of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville’s Fisk University, a renowned African American a cappella ensemble that brought Negro spirituals to international attention after the Civil War. An a cappella version of Jubilee premiered at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival — Seattle Opera premieres the fully orchestrated production Jubilee in October.

Virginia Opera is collaborating with the Richmond Symphony to bring a landmark Civil Rights moment to the stage beginning in April. Loving v. Virginia (Damien Geter, composer; Jessica Murphy Moo, librettist) depicts Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple at the heart of the 1967 Supreme Court case that overturned their felony conviction for illegal marriage. Geter and Murphy Moo portray the Lovings as small-town people navigating enormous legal battles. For all its immensity, the story is also personal: “This Supreme Court decision means a lot to me,” Murphy Moo says. “It made my marriage possible. It made my family possible.” In the score, Geter uses the chorus to represent the law. “We wanted to make the law a character, so we personified it by creating a law chorus,” he says. Initially, the chorus drones in unison, symbolizing a rigid legal framework. Their lines eventually bloom into four-part harmony, reflecting the Lovings’ evolving fight for justice.

Finally, Cincinnati Opera’s Black Opera Project, a three-opera commissioning initiative that engages Black creators to develop new works celebrating Black stories, premieres on Juneteenth (June 19, 2025) with its first opera next season. Lalovavi (Kevin Day, composer; Tifara Brown, libretto) will be the first-ever grand Afrofuturist opera. In developing the libretto, Brown discovered Tut, the secret language developed by American enslaved people, while scrolling on TikTok. “This was a language that came out of a resistance movement,” she says. (Lalovavi means “love” in Tut.) Set in the year 2119, the opera is a sci-fi adventure about the story’s heroine rediscovering the meaning of love.

Comedy Returns

The slate of premieres in the 2024–2025 season also offers its share of lighter fare. In his first opera, The Cook-Off, composer Shawn E. Okpebholo makes his first foray into humor: “Comedies are hard,” he says. “It’s easy to make people cry — to make people laugh is about timing and pacing in a different way.” Mark Campbell’s libretto for The Cook-Off portrays a riotous cooking show in which three contestants vie to craft the best macaroni and cheese. “There are few things all cultures embrace,” says Okpebholo. “One is food — breaking bread together and enjoying a good meal. The other thing is music.” Nashville Opera will premiere The Cook-Off as a double bill alongside Lee Hoiby and Mark Shulgasser’s Bon Appétit! in November.

Lyric Opera of the North in Duluth, Minn., is also dipping a toe into bite-sized comedy with Circe on Superior (Peter Hilliard, composer; Matt Boresi, librettist). In this quasi-autobiographical, opera-within- an-opera, an under-staffed, big-hearted regional opera company overcomes a flurry of amusing obstacles to mount an ambitious production of Homer’s The Odyssey. Circe on Superior will premiere alongside an adaptation of Mozart’s The Impresario in November.

For many opera companies, Amahl and the Night Visitors has become a holiday tradition. Now, Opera Orlando will premiere a one-act opera intended to be a companion to the work: Four Lost Santas (Spicer Carr, composer and librettist; Rose Freeman, librettist) in December. This opera centers on a barbershop quartet of Santas on their way to a holiday gig when their car breaks down, derailing their plans and spurring an existential crisis for at least one of the Fathers Christmas.

In October, Opera Las Vegas will present the comic chamber opera Again and Again and Again (Conrad Cummings, composer; Mark Campbell, librettist), loosely based on Pierre Corneille’s 1636 play L’illusion comique. The fantastical story follows a forlorn father in rural France who enlists a sorcerer to help him find his estranged son, who’s skipped town as well as four centuries. The father’s whimsical journey across time culminates in a heartfelt reunion.

Intimate Arias

There are also several tales of interpersonal family relationships, including Lucidity (Laura Kaminsky, composer; David Cote, librettist), which premieres with New York City’s On Site Opera in November before going on to Seattle Opera that same month. This opera explores the dynamics between a classical singer (played by soprano Lucy Shelton) with early-stage dementia, her caregiver son, a neuroscientist, and a young clarinetist working in a music therapy trial. Kaminsky and Cote are both personally familiar with the challenges of caregiving, and Cote says he wants to explore the power of music therapy in this opera: “Not as a panacea, or a magical cure, but as a bit of light in the inevitability of life. It’s so interesting what music can mean in those spaces.” In the score, Kaminsky integrates themes from Schubert’s lied “Shepherd on the Rock” for clarinet, voice, and piano to tie the characters to the ensemble.

Novel Tales

A tale inspired by a novel, Truman & Nancy (William Zeffiro, composer; Ande J. Parks) follows Truman Capote’s journey to Kansas and imagined conversations with the spirit of Nancy Clutter, a teenage victim of the real-life Clutter family murders, which Capote chronicled. Opera Vermont stages this adaptation of Ande Parks’ graphic novel Capote in Kansas, which draws from Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, in November.

In January, Lyric Opera of Orange County (LOOC) will premiere The Yellow Wallpaper (Brooke deRosa, composer; Diana Farrell, librettist). The opera is based on writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s chilling eponymous short story in which she explores her personal experience with post-partum depression and the notorious women’s “restcure” — numerous weeks of isolation, prescribed by male doctors. The main character’s physician husband confines her to a small room, leading to a chilling descent into madness. Diana Farrell, founding artistic director of LOOC, quoted these physicians’ writings in the libretto and those of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, a pioneering woman physician whose research negating the “rest-cure” was ignored. “It seemed a bizarre parallel to know that it’s been 150 years since Jacobi’s research and nearly 130 years since Gilman first published her novella, and yet in many places, women are still not allowed autonomy over their bodies and care,” Farrell says. “Art imitating life imitating art, squared.