Chautauqua Opera Company’s 2025 Season

For its 2025 season, Chautauqua Opera continues its 95-year history of producing opera at Chautauqua Institution while also strengthening its commitment to developing new opera. Alongside a production of Puccini’s La bohème in Chautauqua’s Amphitheater, the company will conduct workshops of three new operas. Ranging from chamber operas to large-scale pieces, these workshops will feature Chautauqua Opera Company’s 16 Young Artists collaborating with celebrated composers and librettists. Chautauqua audiences will have the exclusive opportunity to experience these new operas in their developmental stages.  

The first two weeks of the 2025 season are dedicated to an orchestral workshop of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo, based on George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel, and commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. The workshop will involve 85 musicians, marshalling the combined forces of the Chautauqua Opera Company, Opera Conservatory and Symphony Orchestra, and featuring the internationally renowned soprano Christine Goerke.  A public presentation of 60 minutes of the opera, followed by a conversation with the creators will take place in Norton Hall. While in rehearsals and production for La bohème, Chautauqua Opera Company will also workshop two chamber operas: Ida by Lamplight, a new work by Jeremy Gill and Jerre Dye, and Sitcom, a neo-baroque comic opera by Luke Styles and Alan McKendrick. Both will receive public presentations with piano and harpsichord accompaniment to close the season.  La bohème and all three workshops will be conducted by general and artistic director Steven Osgood.