In light of having to shut down performances due to recent events, The Metropolitan Opera is going to be streaming past performances of their Live in HD series free on their website starting tonight, March 16th, at 7:30pm EDT. These recordings will be free to watch for the next 20 hours (meaning that the one tonight will become unavailable tomorrow, March 17th, at 3:30pm EDT), and will be consistently aired until they open their doors again.

The Met's Live in HD series brings recordings of their performances to theaters in over 70 countries all around the globe. If you'd like to learn more about it, you can find that information here. The stream will likely have a number of languages to choose subtitles from.

Here's a link to The Met's website, if you're interested.

Tonight's performance is Bizet's Carmen, a famous French opera set in Spain, based off of a novella of the same name by Prosper Mérimée. Originally debuted in Paris on March 3rd, 1875, it was highly controversial for the time.

Here's a synopsis of it to get a good idea of what it's about, and here's one of the songs from the same recording as the one that's going to be streamed tonight. I'd suggest listening to a little bit of it if you haven't before, since it's a pretty recognizable song.

The entire list of performances for this week (starting with today) are: Bizet's Carmen, Puccini’s La Bohème, Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Verdi’s La Traviata, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

I'm not sure how many people here are actually that interested in opera, but it feels wrong not to share this.