Reading the 2025/26 Season

The curtain has closed on the 2024/25 Season, and the new opera season may seem far away, but the drama, passion, and beauty of great storytelling do not have to wait. While we count down the days to opening night, add these books — exploring the themes of our 2025/26 Season — to your summer beach bag and stay immersed in exuberant tales.

Head over to Sandmeyer's Bookstore to pick up any of these titles — either in person at 714 S. Dearborn St or online.

Cherubini’s Medea burns with fury and powerful revenge, much like Circe in Madeline Miller’s lush retelling. Circe is a misunderstood Greek goddess with a gift that may leave you rooting for the villain. Her no-nonsense attitude has certainly rubbed off on her niece, Medea.

Love turns lethal in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. In Caroline Kepnes’s debut novel turned hit Netflix series, Joe Goldberg has an unsettling grip on his romantic life and is no stranger to the deadly consequences of love.

Strauss’s Salome is full of seduction and decay, and its source material is just as scandalous. Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy depicts biblical characters with sumptuous prose that translates beautifully to a musical score.

Fidelity, flirtation, and gendered expectations of love are peppered all throughout Mozart’s dazzling Così fan tutte. In a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, this novel brings the Bennet sisters and their quest for love to the 21st century.

Renée Fleming’s Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene explores the evolution of human experience in nature through a combination of classic Romantic era works and contemporary works. Similarly, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws from her upbringing as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and her training as a botanist to embrace nature as life’s oldest teacher and urge for a reciprocal relationship between humans and the living world.

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly examines the catastrophic results when two differing cultures encounter each other. Spanning generations and culture, Ozeki explores belonging and isolation through this metafictional work. Novelist Ruth meets Nao, a sixteen-year-old Japanese-American girl stuck between two worlds, when her journal washes ashore on a deserted island.

Audiences witness the reunion of two legendary artists in Cruz’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego. Renowned painter Frida Kahlo’s diary spans the last ten years of her life, recounting the turbulent relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, memories from her childhood, and dozens of watercolor illustrations.

Chicago’s first poet laureate avery r. young presents a universal yet personal story of the Booker family in the world premiere of safronia. Wilkerson’s sweeping account of the Great Migration follows the journeys of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster, interwoven against the backdrop of an American epic.