An Evening at the Opera

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and a summer sky over the Crosby Theatre.

Summer in Santa Fe is nonstop: Spanish Market, Indian Market, Folk Art Market, Pancakes on the Plaza and, always, the Opera. The Santa Fe Opera is famous for many reasons. The productions are always solid with some of the finest performers and musicians in the world, but the space itself is half the draw. This is the part of the Santa Fe Opera that no recording and no photograph quite captures: the house is open to the air, set on its ridge north of town, and the mountains do half the staging for you.

We were away for Opening Night, but were happy to see Madama Butterfly, the season’s opener, this past Friday. Before a single note, there was the sunset, laying itself across the Jemez to the west, while to the east, the Sangre de Cristos turned the red of their name. You arrive for the music and are met first by the landscape. People spread suppers on tailgates in the parking lot, the wind moves through, and then the light lowers itself almost on cue, as if the evening had read the score.

The opera was Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. It opened the company’s season this summer and it will close it at the end of August. It is a familiar work, and familiarity is part of its risk; everyone in the audience arrives already knowing how it ends. Cio-Cio-San, a young woman in Nagasaki, gives everything she has to an American naval officer who was never going to stay. She waits. She keeps waiting after waiting has stopped being reasonable. The tragedy is not that she is deceived, exactly, but that her faith is so complete and so misplaced. Puccini asks the soprano to carry nearly all of it, and the role is one of the most demanding he ever wrote.

The soprano in the title role, Karen Chia-ling Ho, was extraordinary, the kind of voice that makes a large open-air house feel suddenly intimate, the sound arriving clean across all that distance. One of the most extraordinary things about the Santa Fe Opera is the acoustics and the artistry of its performers. No one is ever mic’d, but you can hear every note perfectly.

The Santa Fe Opera has been part of this city’s summer since 1957, and it remains one of the reasons people who could go anywhere in July choose to be here. It is not only the productions, though the productions are serious. It is the setting: an art form built for gilded rooms in old European capitals, performed instead under a New Mexican sky, with the weather and the light as unpredictable collaborators. There is no place like it, and there is no place like Santa Fe.

We drove home late with the music still in our heads. Some evenings simply confirm what you already believe: that beauty is worth making the trip for.

Planning a visit: Madama Butterfly at the Santa Fe Opera, 2026

When is Madama Butterfly at the Santa Fe Opera in 2026? It opened the 2026 season and plays through the summer, with performances from July 3 to August 29, 2026, in the Crosby Theatre.

Who sings Cio-Cio-San? Soprano Karen Chia-ling Ho, in her company debut. John Fiore conducts, and Melanie Bacaling directs a revival of Lee Blakeley’s production.

Is the Santa Fe Opera outdoors? Yes. The Crosby Theatre is open to the air, set on a ridge north of town. Bring a jacket; evenings turn cool once the sun is down.

Are the singers amplified? No. The Santa Fe Opera performs without electronic amplification; the roof’s curve is built to carry the voices across the open-air house.

More from Webster Santa Fe The Dispatch · The Library · The Journal