The Israeli Opera turns 40 this year, an age that invites both celebration and reflection.
For an institution that has long navigated the tension between cultural establishment and creative experimentation, this milestone is not just about marking time – it is a chance to ask what opera means here and now, in a country where the word “stage” carries layers of history, identity, and imagination.
Presenting the new season to the press, general director Tali Barash-Gottlieb spoke with both pride and perspective.
“It’s a great thrill to open a season that celebrates the Israeli Opera,” she said, “but it’s also an opportunity to thank the artists, creators, and the extraordinary backstage teams, as well as the audiences who have accompanied us with love. After 40 years, we’re not only celebrating survival, we’re asking what our role should be, artistically and socially, in this moment.”
She noted that the anniversary year would also feature “a variety of social, educational, and community initiatives across the country, giving the season an extra layer of meaning.”
Opening productions of the season
The season, opening in November, brings together seven productions that traverse myth, history, and contemporary realities.
It begins where the Opera itself began: Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell, the company’s very first production in 1985.
Italian director Stefano Poda, known for his visually sculptural style, reimagines the Baroque tragedy as an abstract meditation on love, destiny, and ruin. Conducted by Gerd Amelung, it asks why certain stories, a queen undone by love, a hero unable to stay, refuse to fade.
Barash-Gottlieb emphasized that the production also celebrates the Opera’s homegrown talent: “All the soloists are graduates of our Meitar Opera Studio, embodying the creative journey we nurture here.”
The season as a whole showcases both Israeli artists and performers from around the world, highlighting the Opera’s cosmopolitan character and its dialogue between local and international perspectives.
January brings Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, directed by Shirit Lee Weiss and conducted by music director Dan Ettinger. It tells the story of a blind princess kept in darkness by her father until love forces her to confront both truth and pain.
“It’s a story about seeing, literally and metaphorically,” Weiss explained, “and about what happens when innocence meets awareness.”
The production draws on Israeli design talent, Adam Keller (sets), Ula Shevtsov (costumes), and Nadav Barnea (lighting), to craft a world that merges poetic imagery with psychological depth.
New and classic opera productions
The company’s most ambitious undertaking this season is a new Israeli opera – The Dybbuk, by Josef Bardanashvili, directed and written by Ido Riklin. Based on S. Ansky’s classic play, it transforms mystical legend into a psychological and social drama of choice, repression, and forbidden love.
Bardanashvili, an acclaimed Israeli composer known for blending Jewish musical traditions with contemporary orchestration, brings a distinct modern voice to the story. “The Dybbuk is the ghost of everything we suppress,” Riklin said. “It’s about the cost of freedom in a society afraid of change.”
The music, Bardanashvili’s own composition, blends Jewish tradition with the complex inner lives of its characters, moving between moments of joy and profound despair.
Later comes Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a work that balances fairy-tale whimsy with philosophical inquiry. Ettinger reflects: “It’s almost impossible to tire of it. Every generation finds its own truth in it.”
Then, the season turns darker. Richard Strauss’s Salome, directed by Itay Tiran with choreography by Renana Raz, stages a fever dream where beauty and violence are inseparable: “Salome refuses to look away,” Tiran observed, “and that refusal is political.”
Verdi’s Nabucco, arriving in June under Brazilian-Jewish director André Heller-Lopes, brings another form of defiance. Its famous chorus, Va, pensiero, long regarded as an anthem of exile and longing, resonates in today’s Israel with renewed urgency.
The season closes with Puccini’s Tosca, a story of art, love, and corruption, which remains very contemporary 125 years after its premiere in Rome in January 1900.
Beyond the main stage, the Israeli Opera continues to expand its educational and community programs. “We see education and accessibility as part of our cultural mission,” Barash-Gottlieb emphasized. “Art can’t stay behind closed doors.”
Four decades after its founding, the Israeli Opera remains a complex institution: local yet cosmopolitan, traditional yet experimental. The new season looks back with gratitude and forward with quiet urgency.
Perhaps, like Dido, Iolanta, or Salome, it understands that the power of art lies not in comfort or consensus, but in its capacity to ask difficult questions, and to find beauty in the asking.