Wolf Trap Opera Broadcasts Return to Opera Matinee in June 2026

Upon the conclusion of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast season on May 30, 2026*, WETA Classical’s Opera Matinee will once again showcase two productions from Wolf Trap Opera’s 2025 summer season at The Barns – one a longtime comedic perennial comedy favorite and an important 20^th century opera that draws on historical events.

Wolf Trap Opera is a summer residency program of Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, designed to give emerging professional singers important experience and career development.  WTO selects its artists from among the best classical vocalists in the country and places them in repertoire that showcases their talent. 

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Mozart’s beloved The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro) starts the broadcasts on June 6.  This enduring opera buffa is a delightful concoction of love and comedy, fidelity and a send-up on social class.  Le Nozze di Figaro premiered in Vienna in 1786 to great success, and it represents a few firsts in Mozart’s development as an operatic composer: it was his first grand Italian opera designed for the Viennese court and his first collaboration with poet and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.  The Mozart-Da Ponte dream team produced three of Mozart’s most celebrated Italian operas: Figaro,Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte.  Figaro is based on a play by the 18^th century French writer Pierre Beaumarchais that was considered revolutionary in its day because the main characters were everyday people and because of its political satire and changing attitudes about aristocracy. In The Marriage of Figaro, the title character is the beleaguered servant of Count Almaviva.  Figaro and his fiancé, along with the Countess Almaviva, scheme to stem the Count’s amorous adventures and teach him a lesson in fidelity.  The characters are multi-dimensional and react to challenges as they pursue happiness. Despite the comedic strain running through the opera, Mozart inserted several lovely and poignant arias.  This Wolf Trap performance features Christian Simmons as Figaro and Arianna Rodriguez as Susanna.  Emily Senturia conducted.

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The following Saturday, June 13, is the dramatic and tragic Dialogues of the Carmelites, a 1957 opera by the Frenchman Francis Poulenc, a highlight of 20^th century opera that is based on a historical event during the Reign of Terror of the 18^th century French Revolution: the execution of Carmelite nuns by guillotine for their refusal to abdicate their vocation.  As the title indicates, the opera unfolds in twelve vignettes through a series of conversations among the nuns about the external forces that affect their daily lives; through their dialogues they explore grace, faith, sacrifice and martyrdom.  Poulenc employed the recitative – a musical device patterned on spoken language and set to musical pitches – to convey many of these conversations. In the stirring finale, the sisters are willingly led one by one to the guillotine, while singing Salve Regina.  Geoffrey McDonald, a frequent collaborator with Wolf Trap Opera, conducted this performance.

Broadcasts start at 1:00 pm (ET) and will include commentary by Lee Anne Myslewski, Vice President for Opera and Classical Programming at Wolf Trap.

This summer season of Wolf Trap Opera at The Barns offers Rossini’s La Cenerentola on selected dates from June 18^th through June 27th and Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky on selected dates from July 17th through 25^th.  Wolf Trap’s Filene Center will present Puccini’s Tosca on August 7.  Details at wolftrap.org.

*The Met’s final broadcast will be the 20^th century opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, by Gabriela Lena Frank, a fictitious story based on the lives of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.