San Francisco Opera announced its 2026–27 season on Tuesday, including repertory fare like Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Puccini’s Tosca alongside lesser-performed works like Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Massanet’s Manon.
In preparation for a 2028 mounting of Wagner’s full Ring cycle, the War Memorial Opera House will host the first of the cycle’s four parts, Das Rheingold, as a standalone opera.
Coming off a bold 2025 run that included an acclaimed revival of Dead Man Walking, a critically praised Parsifal and a widely hailed world premiere of The Monkey King, SF Opera will also present Thea Musgrave’s underperformed 1977 opera Mary, Queen of Scots. The booking of a relatively lesser-known work would seem to bank on the hope that, after its string of recent successes, audiences will trust SF Opera’s taste and curation.
“When I saw this work in London last year, I was awed by the power of Thea’s dramatic writing,” said SF Opera’s general director Matthew Shilvock of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a statement. “She brings the Tudor queen into vivid relief, revealing both the fierce determination and the profound vulnerability of an 18-year-old woman fighting to retain her agency against overwhelming odds.”
Music Director Eun Sun Kim will conduct Simon Boccanegra (Sept. 12–27, 2026), Manon (Oct. 15–Nov. 1, 2026) and Das Rheingold (May 29–June 22, 2027), as well as the annual Opera in the Park concert in Golden Gate Park (Sept. 13, 2026) and an all-Richard Strauss program featuring soprano Adela Zaharia (Nov. 6, 2026).
