OperaDelaware Announces the 2026/27 Season

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OperaDelaware has announced the 2026/27 season under the new artistic vision of incoming General Director Eric Einhorn. The season offers audiences an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of the operatic art form with two main stage masterworks at The Grand Opera House, a site-specific community production at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, and a series of intimate chamber performances at OperaDelaware Studios featuring Spanish zarzuela, a rare Puccini gem, and electrifying monodramas.

Of the announcement, incoming General Director Eric Einhorn says, “I am incredibly excited to start my tenure by sharing this dynamic season with OperaDelaware audiences, which sets out to explore the different forms opera can take and the places it can go. Partnerships with pillars of the nonprofit arts and social services community in Wilmington and beyond also feature prominently throughout the season to enhance the impact of our productions.” He adds, “I look forward to working alongside the OperaDelaware staff and board to launch this new vision, which is built on the strong foundation created by my predecessor, Brendan Cooke.”

OperaDelaware Main Stage Series

OperaDelaware opens its season with Mozart's Don Giovanni, a co-production with Opera Baltimore. Director Haley Stamats returns to OperaDelaware after directing Puccini’s La bohème in 2024 and Tosca in 2025 while conductor Joshua Horsch will make his OperaDelaware debut from the podium. This production stars Jonathan Bryan as the titular Don Giovanni, soprano Katerina Burton as Donna Anna, tenor Hayden Smith as Don Ottavio, mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit as Donna Elvira, bass baritone Dylan Gregg as Leporello, baritone Gerard Moon as Masetto, and soprano Robin Steitz as Zerlina. Written in 1787 with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni is a moral thriller, a ghost story, and a comedy rolled into one. The opera follows the legendary libertine Don Giovanni as he evades the consequences of a lifetime of conquest and cruelty, until a final, supernatural reckoning forces him to choose between repentance and damnation. Performances with full orchestra at The Grand Opera House on October 16 at 7:30PM and October 18 at 2:00PM.

The season's spring main stage production is Christoph Willibald Glück's Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice), produced in partnership with First State Ballet Theatre.  Director Keturah Stickann makes her OperaDelaware debut, OD Music Director Anthony Barrese will conduct, and First State Ballet Theatre choreographer and dancer Zachary Kapeluck will choreograph. The production will star OD Company Artist soprano Emily Margevich (Eurydice) alongside Delaware-native soprano Jennifer Zetlan (Amore), and feature dancers from First State Ballet Theatre. Set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi, the opera integrates stirring vocalism and dynamic dance to tell the story of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld to reclaim his late wife, Eurydice, and the devastating cost of a single broken promise. Orpheus and Eurydice changed the course of operatic history, and remains one of the most emotionally potent works in the repertoire. Performances with full orchestra at The Grand Opera House on May 21 at 7:30PM and May 23 at 2:00PM.

OperaDelaware Chamber Series

Ahead of its main stage production at The Grand Opera House, OperaDelaware will present Don Giovanni Portraits at The OperaDelaware Studios on October 8 and 10, an intimate preview built around a new chamber orchestra reduction of Mozart's score by Husan Chun-Novak. The program offers audiences a rare, up-close encounter with the opera's most pivotal characters and confrontations performed in the intimate setting of OperaDelaware Studios. Don Giovanni Portraits invites audiences to step inside Mozart's music before experiencing it in full scale this October at The Grand.

For the first time in its history, OperaDelaware will present zarzuela, a popular operatic form developed in Spain and made popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. OperaDelaware Studios will present a chamber reduction of Federico Moreno Torroba's Luisa Fernanda, widely regarded as the last great romantic zarzuela. Premiered in Madrid in 1932, the work follows its heroine through a love triangle set against the political upheaval of 1868 Spain, pairing Torroba's vivid Spanish nationalism with sweeping, unforgettable melody. Fernanda will be directed by Malena Dayen, last seen at OperaDelaware with her production Derrick Wang’s Fearless and starring Company Artists Dane Suarez, Gerard Moon, and Emily Margevich. Performances at the OperaDelaware Studios on November 13 and 15, 2026, sung in Spanish with English translations. Produced in partnership with Opera Hispanica.

In a milestone new community partnership, OperaDelaware will present a site-specific production of Gian Carlo Menotti's beloved holiday opera Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, a Wilmington nonprofit located on the same city block as OperaDelaware, providing emergency shelter, rehabilitative programs, and community outreach to our most vulnerable citizens. OperaDelaware will present a modern re-telling of this beloved opera about generosity, hope, and faith in direct conversation with the community it serves. Directed by OperaDelaware’s General Director, Eric Einhorn. Performances at The Sunday Breakfast Mission on December 5 and 6, 2026.

OperaDelaware will present Written in Secret, an intimate pairing of tenor monodramas, on January 22 and 24, 2027. The program opens with Janáček's The Diary of One Who Vanished, based on a 1916 newspaper diary of a village boy's forbidden love for a Roma girl named Zefka. It closes with Daron Hagen's Songs of Madness and Sorrow, a mutli-character work voiced by a single performer channeling the collapsing psyche of a small town at the close of the nineteenth century, where market panic and epidemic disease gave rise to two kinds of madness: obsessive ritual and paranoia. Stage director Katherine M. Carter makes her OD debut and Dane Suarez stars in this rare and limited studio engagement.

Audiences will have a rare opportunity to hear where it all began: Giacomo Puccini's first opera, Le Villi (1884), a gothic tale of love and vengeance rooted in the same Central European folklore that inspired the ballet Giselle. Composed when Puccini was just twenty-five, Le Villi reveals the dramatic instinct and melodic gift that would define the career of one of opera's greatest voices.

Orpheus Retold brings together three one-act operas that reimagine the world's oldest love story from radically different perspectives. Featuring OperaDelaware Company Artists and the music of three living composers, the program opens with Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's To Hell and Back, a devastating chamber drama recasting the abduction of Persephone as a modern story of spousal abuse. It continues with Eurydice by Jodi Goble — receiving its world premiere in a new version created specifically for Company Artist Emily Margevich — a through-composed setting of Hilda Doolittle's Imagist poem that gives voice to the silent Eurydice. The evening closes with Jonathan Dove's L'altra Euridice, from his trilogy Tales of Hope and Desire, which inverts the myth entirely by telling the story from the perspective of Pluto, recasting the god of the underworld not as villain but as a devoted partner undone by loss.

The thread through all of it:

Every story in this season turns on a single moment of choice. Don Giovanni chooses damnation over repentance. A man chooses to leave the woman who loves him. A mother chooses to steal, is caught, and grace arrives anyway. Orpheus, at the other end of the season, chooses doubt over trust at the last possible second.

Opera has always known that the most interesting thing about a person is what they do when everything is at stake. This season is built around that question.

Season tickets are on sale July 16. We hope you'll be here for all of it.