THE METROPOLITAN OPERA OPENING NIGHT

The Metropolitan Opera’s opening night is the first performance of its season, on an evening in late September at the opera house at Lincoln Center, on the Upper West Side of New York: cocktails at half past five, the curtain at half past six, and after the performance a dinner with the cast, all of it black tie. It is the Met’s opening gala, and it is sold to anyone who will pay for it.

Before the curtain, the twelve chandeliers in the auditorium, a gift of the Austrian government in thanks for Marshall Plan aid, rise to the ceiling.

The Boxes

The Met was founded because the boxes at the Academy of Music, New York’s established opera house, were few, and the old families who held them would not let in the newly rich. On 28 April 1880 a group of twenty-two men met at Delmonico’s restaurant and set up subscriptions for the ownership of a company of their own.

They built their own house, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, at 1411 Broadway, on the corner of 39th Street, with three tiers of private boxes; among the first subscribers were members of the Morgan, Roosevelt and Vanderbilt families. It opened on 22 October 1883 with Gounod’s Faust, with Christina Nilsson. The Academy of Music’s opera season folded three years later.

Fire gutted the house on 27 August 1892, and it was rebuilt. Carrère and Hastings redesigned it in 1903 and gave it the red and gold interior it kept to the end, with 3,625 seats and room for 224 standing.

In 1893 a supper club, the Vaudeville Club, opened in a lobby of the house, with a stage by Stanford White. It became the Opera Club the next year and was incorporated in 1899. Its members, required to dress for the opera, are known as the Penguins.

The old house gave its farewell gala on 16 April 1966, and was demolished in 1967.

The House

The new house at Lincoln Center was designed by Wallace K. Harrison; it was his forty-third design for it. While it was being dug, the excavation was known as “Lake Bing”, after Rudolf Bing, the general manager. It opened officially on 16 September 1966 with the world premiere of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Leontyne Price.

The chandeliers in the lobby and the auditorium were designed by Hans Harald Rath, of J. & L. Lobmeyr. Two murals by Chagall, The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music, each about thirty feet by thirty-six, face the plaza through the glass of the front. The gold damask house curtain, “the largest tab curtain in the world”, was a gift of the Opera Club.

For its hundredth year the Met opened the 1983 to 1984 season with Les Troyens, in which Jessye Norman made her debut, and on 22 October 1983, a hundred years to the day after Faust, gave a Centennial Gala that lasted eight hours.

In 2026 the Met said that a Saudi contribution had been delayed; the Met reduced its productions, laid off twenty-two employees and considered selling the Chagalls, which Sotheby’s appraised at $55 million.

The Gala

In New York, WWD wrote in 2019, “the start of fall isn’t marked so much by Labor Day weekend ... but by the first major event of the season”, and the opening of the Met is that event.

The evening has a fixed shape. Cocktails are served from half past five; the performance begins at half past six; and after it the gala dinner is given with the cast and the creative team. The dress is black tie. It was the same in 2025, when the season opened on Sunday 21 September with Kavalier & Clay.

On other nights the Met asks for little. “While there is no dress code at the Met,” it says, “we recommend comfortable clothing appropriate for a professional setting”, and it adds that people tend to dress more formally for galas and the openings of new productions, “but this is optional.” Opening night is both, and its listing leaves nothing optional: black tie. The Opera Club keeps a rule of its own, black tie at every evening performance and white tie requested at premieres, at galas and on certain Monday nights.

Opening night is the first of the season’s galas, all of them black tie and all priced from $1,500: in the 2026 to 2027 season, Lincoln in the Bardo on 19 October, La Fanciulla del West on New Year’s Eve, Silent Night on 8 March, and on 25 May the Diamond Jubilee, for sixty years at Lincoln Center.

In 2026 the season opened on Tuesday 22 September with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, directed by Louisa Proske in her Met debut, with sets by Jon Bausor, and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Lise Davidsen sang Lady Macbeth, Quinn Kelsey Macbeth, Freddie De Tommaso Macduff and Ryan Speedo Green Banquo. Bachtrack saw a “post-apocalyptic wasteland” on a revolving set, praised Kelsey’s dagger soliloquy and heard from De Tommaso “some of the most impressive singing of the evening”; BroadwayWorld saw film noir, and singled out Davidsen’s sleepwalking scene. Sigourney Weaver, Julianna Margulies, Patricia Clarkson, Susan Lucci and Georgina Chapman were among the guests. The production ran for ten performances, to 20 October, and was shown Live in HD on 17 October, in the twentieth season of the series.

What to Know

It is held on an evening in late September. The 2027 opening night has not been announced; the 2026 to 2027 season closes with the Diamond Jubilee gala on 25 May 2027.

Gala tickets, which include the cocktails, the performance and the dinner, start at $1,500, part of which is a tax-deductible contribution, and are sold by telephone on 212.362.6000. For ordinary performances seats are sold online, at the box office and by telephone, and $25 rush tickets are released through the website on the day.

Black tie, as the gala listing says. The Met has no dress code for ordinary performances, and the press sometimes reports as much of the gala; the listing is plain.

The opera house is on the Upper West Side, between West 62nd and 65th Streets and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues.

The mistake is to arrive late. The curtain rises at half past six, and latecomers “will not be admitted to the auditorium until intermission”.

The Court

The Metropolitan Opera Opening Night is not the Court’s own. Places at the gala, from the cocktails to the dinner with the cast, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in New York, and the table afterward. In 2026 it fell on the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.