Rome Opera Chooses The Rake’s Progress to Start New Season

The Teatro dell’Opera di Roma opens its 2026–27 season on 27 November with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, conducted by music director Michele Mariotti and staged by Rafael R. Villalobos. The work has not appeared at the house since 1968. Bringing it back makes a distinct statement at the start of a programme that includes nine staged operas, two operas in concert form, seven ballets and three special events.

Stravinsky’s opera follows Tom Rakewell through promises of pleasure and the consequences of his choices. Its eighteenth-century model and twentieth-century musical language sit uneasily together, a quality that can make the story feel both familiar and strange. For an opening production, it offers a test of the company’s ability to make irony, theatrical movement and musical detail work in the same room.

The size of the season is also an organisational undertaking. Eleven opera and dance productions are new, and the ballet company plans two tours. Singers, dancers, orchestra, chorus, stage technicians and rehearsal spaces must fit into a schedule extending over many months. Artistic variety depends on that coordination, not merely on the list of titles in a brochure.

Mariotti is due to conduct the following two opening productions as well: Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito in 2027 and Verdi’s Don Carlo in 2028. That gives his leadership a longer arc than a single November premiere. The new season can therefore be read both as a present set of performances and as the beginning of a sequence of openings shaped by one conductor.

The return of The Rake’s Progress invites audiences to rediscover a work absent for nearly six decades. Its first night will also offer the clearest indication of how the company intends to connect an ambitious annual programme with individual, memorable evenings.