The auditorium of the Teatro alla Scala. Via Wikimedia Commons.
On 7 December 2026, for Sant’Ambrogio, La Scala opens with Verdi’s Otello, directed by Damiano Michieletto, and on the podium is the real news of the season: Myung-Whun Chung makes his debut as the theatre’s music director. The Korean has been at home in Milan for thirty years, but the title changes everything: after the Chailly era, La Scala entrusts its musical identity to a conductor whose relationship with Verdi is that of a long-standing devotee, and indeed he also keeps Macbeth for himself, in the season, directed by Barrie Kosky.
The 2026/27 programme lines up thirteen operas for some ninety performances, and read closely it contains three pieces of news. The first: Bellini’s I Puritani returns to La Scala after more than half a century, absent since 1971, with Fabio Luisi on the podium and Davide Livermore directing. The second: John Adams’s Nixon in China arrives for the first time at the Piermarini, conducted by Kent Nagano, and for a theatre that rarely visits twentieth-century American work it is almost a political statement; together with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, entrusted to Chailly, it finally brings a little twentieth-century oxygen into the schedule. The third is the most curious: Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora, a first at La Scala, that is, the opera that set the same subject as Fidelio to music before Beethoven: programming it in the season leading up to the Beethoven bicentenary (Beethoven died in 1827) is a connoisseur’s stroke.
The rest balances box office and craft: Riccardo Muti returns with Anna Bolena, Zeffirelli’s La Bohème endures like a civic monument, Don Giovanni with Carsen, Massenet’s Don Quichotte with Michieletto, the Barbiere, and a Purcell Dido and Aeneas that stretches the repertoire backwards. In ballet, the novelty is Giselle rewritten by Akram Khan, an Italian premiere, alongside The Nutcracker and the tribute to Béjart on his centenary.
The Melos reading, which our readers know: thirteen titles, and the works by living composers can be counted on one finger, Nixon in China, written, incidentally, forty years ago. It is the most splendid museum in the world, run superbly, and it remains a museum: our proposal for reopening the workshop applies to La Scala before anyone else. That said, a Puritani after fifty-five years and a Paër exhumed with intelligence are the right way to run a museum: the display cases, at least, change. Sources: official presentation of the season, Teatro alla Scala, May 2026.