The Washington National Opera on Friday announced an ambitious program of operas and concerts across the Washington region for the 2026-27 season as it seeks to reinvent itself six months after it left the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The opera, which announced it was severing its relations with the Kennedy Center as President Trump sought to put his imprint on the institution, said it would produce five full-length operas — including a world premiere based on the life of Georgia O’Keeffe — and three smaller-scale works on five stages across the region. The operas will feature top singers, including Renée Fleming, Isabel Leonard, Thomas Hampson and Christine Goerke.
The announcement begins to answer a critical question about the company’s future: Can it continue as an artistically and economically viable cultural force without the opera house at the Kennedy Center and without the $2.75 million annual subsidy and support staff it had there.
“We didn’t lose any artists,” said Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera. “We didn’t lose any staff when we rebooted as a new company. Nobody lost a paycheck. Nobody lost their benefits. Everyone has been very united.”
There have been challenges. “What has been more difficult is raising money and creating an opera company out of nothing,” she said. “But there is an incredible freedom in this.”
The company is doing more operas than it did in 2024-25, its last undisrupted season, when it presented four operas. But it is planning fewer performances, 27 next season, down from 38 in 2024-25. This reflects the competition for stages at auditoriums that have already booked shows well in advance.
The company’s budget has also increased — to around $30 million next year from $25 million last year — because of the additional costs of renting halls, and the loss of both the Kennedy Center’s subsidy and the in-house staff. The center and the opera are negotiating the fate of a $17 million endowment that the opera said was dedicated to its survival.
“We had to increase our fund-raising budget significantly to cover new costs and to account for limited weeks available in new venues, which means fewer revenue-earning performances per production,” said Timothy O’Leary, the general director of the opera. “Thankfully, we have received leadership support from our board and donor base, as well as a groundswell of new donors from around the country.”
About 1,500 people have made donations to the opera over the last four months, including $500,000 from an anonymous donor, he said. And the Lyric Opera of Chicago has lent the company costumes for a production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”
The Kennedy Center is closing this July for a two-year renovation ordered by Trump. The National Symphony Orchestra, the other major classical music organization based at the Kennedy Center, is expected to announce where it plans to perform during the construction period in the next few weeks.
Of the five operas being presented by Washington National Opera, only one, Verdi’s “La Traviata,” is a revival of a past production. Three more are new productions of established works — Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” recast here through the lens of the Trojan War; John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” featuring Fleming and Hampson; and “Madama Butterfly.” The premiere is “O’Keeffe: Kiss the Sky,” a ballet-opera that will star Leonard, a mezzo-soprano, as O’Keeffe. The music is by Christopher Tin and the libretto by Kelley Rourke.
The Washington National Opera will build a temporary stage that extends into the seating area at DAR Constitution Hall for two operas (“Nixon” and “Butterfly”) and for a concert titled “We the People.” Patrons will be able to sit at cafe tables on either side of the platform.
The other performance spaces are the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater in downtown Washington; Harman Hall at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington; the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., and the opera’s studio in Northwest Washington.
“It’s going to be a very different experience for people,” Zambello said. “I think we’ll get a lot of new audiences.”
She said that she viewed this period, in which the opera will be spread across so many venues, as temporary and that she was hopeful the company could return to the Kennedy Center after renovations were completed and Trump had left the White House.
“I’m proud that we are the organization that went out on a limb and stood up for all the important values that art is about,” she said. “I have to leave behind the Kennedy Center. I am going to remember the ideals of the Kennedy Center, but we are going to practice them someplace else.”
