Photos: Mozart's IDOMENEO at San Francisco Opera

San Francisco Opera is performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Idomeneo from June 14 through June 25 as part of its 2025 Summer Season at the War Memorial Opera House.

Caroline H. Hume Music Director Eun Sun Kim leads these performances of the composer’s early masterpiece, which premiered in 1781 when Mozart was just 25, in a new-to-San Francisco Opera staging by Australian director Lindy Hume. Company Chorus Director John Keene prepares the artists of the San Francisco Opera Chorus for the opera’s choral scenes.

Mozart’s Idomeneo takes place in the aftermath of the Trojan War when a fateful oath to the gods by a shipwrecked king precipitates an impossible choice between duty to his kingdom and love for his own son. Predating Mozart’s famed collaborations with Italian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte (Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte) and his final masterwork for the stage, The Magic Flute, Idomeneo marks a turning point for the composer where the one-time child prodigy had emerged as an artist of singular originality and brilliance.