Crazy in Love, Opera Lafayette’s 2026–2027 season, is an invitation to revel in beauty, wit, and unapologetic charisma. Across three productions, we meet Cupid—the charming scamp who upends the best-laid plans, the Fool who exposes a self-important impostor, and Tito, the ruler whose mercy outshines revenge. From Baroque Versailles and 17th-century England to Classical Rome as imagined by the Enlightenment, these stories remind us that attraction is rarely straightforward — and that the most irresistible impulses are often the ones that carry the story deliciously off course.
LOVER
Rameau’s Les Surprises de l’Amour
Modern World Premiere
Artistic lightning flashed in the private theater of Versailles’ Petits Appartements, where Madame de Pompadour conceived love as both strategy and spectacle—and enlisted Rameau, at the height of his genius, to give it sound.
In Les Surprises de l’Amour, Cupid delights in rearranging the emotional furniture: the cool Uranie finds her reason softened, the beautiful Adonis discovers that Venus always wins. Feelings bloom, certainties wobble, and the dances glitter to Rameau’s incandescent score. The result is irresistible: an evening where elegance sparkles, emotions shift in an instant, and every entrance carries the thrill of the unexpected. This modern world premiere restores the formidable alliance of Pompadour and Rameau to the stage for the first time since 1748—flirtatious, refined, and delightfully witty.
IMPOSTOR
A Court Masque, or The Impostor Unmasked
Welcome to 17th-century England, where masks are currency and music reveals more than it conceals about those who wear them. Bill Barclay, Artistic Director of Concert Theatre Works and former Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe, joins Opera Lafayette for a masquerade accompanied by songs of longing, satire, devotion, and delicious melancholy, all leading to a single question: who is the impostor?
This immersive evening of intrigue invites you to become anyone but yourself as we converge for a concert of devastating beauty and playful entertainments, with music by Dowland and Campion through Purcell and early Handel. Costumes are encouraged. Masks will be waiting. Expect wit, revelation, and the pleasure of seeing the greatest impostor of all finally unmasked.
FRIEND
Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito
Star American tenor Nicholas Phan brings Metastasio’s great hero of La clemenza di Tito to life in arias by the boy wonder Mozart and three composers who shaped him: Mysliveček, Gluck, and Hasse. In Clemenza, betrayal by the closest of friends is real — but so is forgiveness. The emperor Tito chooses magnanimity over fury, friendship over spectacle. Framed by music of Mozart’s true friends and champions, “Papa” Haydn and Marianna Martines, this program reveals genius forged in companionship and rivalry alike. With Mozart at the center, mercy emerges as the ultimate act of love.
Join Opera Lafayette in the delirious mischief of our 2026-207 season, as Crazy in Love casts off the distant and precious to create opera you feel in your body— in the collective hush, the sharpened attention, and the thrill of recognition we share in the dark.
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