Calixto Bieito comes to the MET

The New York Times reported today that Calixto Bieito, the iconoclastic, Catalan opera director will be making his Metropolitan Opera debut during the 2017-2018 season.  He will be staging Giuseppe Verdi's great work La Forza del Destino, in a co-production with the English National Opera. The production will be seen in London (sung in English) the year before it comes to New York where it will be sung in the original Italian.

His productions have been called offensive by some, and brilliant by others. His Parsifal, which has been featured on this website, takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where the old knight Gurnemanz is a defrocked priest turned drug pusher, and, at the conclusion of the production, the character of Parsifal undresses and is carted away to be cannibalized by the rest of the opera's survivors. Another of his productions, Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, staged for the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, featured a scene in a public bathroom.

 

Peter Gelb said that he expected that the new production of Forza "would stimulate audiences, not shock them."  He also added that the production would be set during the period of the Spanish Civil War.