---
title: Six Opera Festivals to Travel For This Autumn, From Verdi's Parma to Jackie Chan's Turandot in Macao
description: Opera festivals in Parma, Gozo, Macao, Brno, Ravenna and Bergamo this autumn, with dates, highlights and what to see, eat and do nearby.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-22T15:44:15.105Z
updated: 2026-10-22T15:48:27.133Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/autumn-opera-festivals-2026
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/unsplash-pk9strujfm8.webp
categories: Food & Culture, Destinations
content_type: Guide
region: Italy, Czech Republic, Europe, Asia Pacific
publication: Rich Travel Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

Summer opera belongs to arenas and country-house lawns. In October and November the music goes back to the towns that made it: Verdi's farmland outside Parma, Donizetti's walled hill city of Bergamo and the Moravian streets where Janáček worked for most of his life. The theatres are smaller, the audiences are largely local and [the food is at its seasonal best](https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/happy-table-what-to-eat-italy-road-trip-autumn), from culatello in the Po valley to young Moravian wine on St Martin's Day.

Six festivals on two continents still have performances between now and the end of November. Here is what is on, which nights to book and how to spend the days in between.

## Parma and Busseto: Verdi's festival closes with Nabucco, the Requiem and Zeffirelli's Aida

**Until 25th October**

The Festival Verdi, now in its 26th edition, runs until 25th October across Parma and Busseto, the market town 40 kilometres away where Verdi grew up. This year's theme is 'Distant Worlds', and the final week gives you three chances to catch it. The Messa da Requiem plays the Teatro Regio on 23rd October, and Pier Luigi Pizzi's staging of Nabucco has its last performance there the following night, 24th October. The festival closes on the afternoon of 25th October in Busseto, where you can see Franco Zeffirelli's Aida, a production designed for a theatre of around 300 seats, which turns an epic about Egyptian armies into something you watch at arm's length.

Book a morning at a Parmigiano Reggiano dairy, where the cheesemakers break the curd in copper vats before most visitors are awake. In the city, look up inside the cathedral at Correggio's Assumption, a dome painted so that the Virgin appears to rise through a whirl of clouds and bodies, then walk across to Benedetto Antelami's octagonal baptistery in pink Verona marble. Inside the Pilotta palace, the Teatro Farnese of 1618 is built almost entirely of wood, and its floor was flooded for a staged naval battle at its first performance.

On the day of the Busseto Aida, go early. Verdi's birthplace stands in the hamlet of Roncole Verdi, and in Busseto itself Casa Barezzi preserves the salon of Antonio Barezzi, the merchant who paid for the young composer's studies and later became his father-in-law. Lunch belongs in a salsamenteria, a charcuterie shop with a few tables, where you should order culatello. The farms of the Bassa Parmense, [the low plain along the Po](https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/the-risotto-road-a-guide-to-europe-s-greatest-rice-festivals-in-2026), cure this prized cut of pork in cellars kept damp by the river fog that settles over the plain in autumn. Parma is around an hour by train from both Milan and Bologna.

## Gozo, Malta: one small island, two rival opera houses and a new Madama Butterfly

**29th and 31st October**

Gozo is 14 kilometres long and has two opera houses, both in its capital, Victoria, and both run by the town's rival band clubs. Teatru Astra opened in 1968 and seats around 1,200. The Teatru tal-Opra Aurora followed in 1976 with around 1,600 seats and celebrates its 50th anniversary this season.

The Aurora opened the autumn with La Traviata in mid October. The Astra answers with a new production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly on 29th and 31st October at 7:30pm, the centrepiece of its Festival Mediterranea and the first time the opera has played there since 2012. Seats cost from €55 in the balcony to €100 in a box.

Late October is warm on Gozo, and the sea is usually still mild enough for a swim at Ramla Bay, a beach of reddish-gold sand below the village of Xagħra. Above the beach, the Ġgantija temples at Xagħra were built more than 5,000 years ago, which makes them older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. Walk the ramparts of the Citadel above Victoria at sunset, when you can see most of the island from its walls, and spend an afternoon at the Xwejni salt pans near Marsalforn, where families still harvest sea salt from pools cut into the rock. Eat ġbejniet, small sheep's milk cheeses sold fresh, dried or peppered, and ftira, the flattened sourdough bread that UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in 2020. The ferry from Ċirkewwa, at the northern tip of Malta, takes about 25 minutes.

## Macao: Jackie Chan directs Turandot for the opera's 100th birthday

**31st October and 1st November**

Puccini's Turandot had its premiere at La Scala in 1926. The 38th Macao International Music Festival, which runs from 2nd October to 29th November under the theme 'Silk Resonances', marks the centenary with a production directed by Jackie Chan, his first opera. In Chan's staging, each principal character has a martial-arts double who acts out the thoughts the singer leaves unspoken, and water runs through the design as a recurring image under shifting light. The cast is largely European: Ewa Płonka sings Turandot, Marco Berti sings Calaf and the chorus of the Opera di Parma joins the Nuova Orchestra Scarlatti under Carlo Montanaro. Performances are at 7:30pm on 31st October and 1st November in the Grand Auditorium of the Macao Cultural Centre, with tickets from MOP$300 to MOP$980. The production first opened in Guangzhou in May.

Arrive a week early and you can add two more festival evenings. The British baroque specialist Laurence Cummings conducts the Macao Orchestra and the countertenor Cameron Shahbazi in the city's Cathedral on 24th October, and Lang Lang gives a recital of Iberian music on 25th October.

That same weekend, from 23rd to 25th October, the free Lusofonia Festival fills the colonial villas of the Taipa Houses with music, dance and food from the Portuguese-speaking world. Four centuries of Portuguese presence shape the Historic Centre of Macao, a UNESCO World Heritage site that runs from the A-Ma Temple to Senado Square and the stone façade of St Paul's, the only part of the church to survive a fire in 1835. Macao is also a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and its Macanese cooking blends Portuguese, Chinese, Indian and African influences. Order minchi, minced meat and diced potato fried with soy, and African chicken, grilled and served in a spiced coconut and peanut sauce, then finish with a warm egg tart in the old fishing village of Coloane. The 73rd Macau Grand Prix takes over the city in November, so book your hotel early if your dates run late. From Hong Kong International Airport, the shuttle bus across the bridge to Macao takes around 45 minutes.

## Brno, Czech Republic: all nine Janáček operas in the city where he lived

**Until 17th November**

Leoš Janáček spent almost his entire life in Brno, and the Janáček Brno festival, named Best Festival at the International Opera Awards in 2018, gives you the most complete portrait of him anywhere. The tenth edition runs until 17th November under the theme 'Roots', and the Janáček Opera of the National Theatre Brno performs all nine of his operas, including two you are unlikely to see staged anywhere else.

Šárka, his first opera, plays as a site-specific production in the Besední dům, the concert hall at the centre of Brno's musical life in Janáček's day, on 28th October and on 15th and 16th November, with the Scottish tenor Nicky Spence as Ctirad. The 28th October performance falls on the anniversary of Czechoslovakia's founding in 1918, a national holiday. His second opera, The Beginning of a Romance, a light work shaped by his years collecting folk songs, is staged in the aula of Brno University of Technology on 3rd, 4th, 12th and 13th November. Jenůfa plays on 7th November and The Makropulos Affair on 15th November. The festival closes on 17th November, the holiday that marks the student protests of 1939 and 1989, with a double bill of From the House of the Dead and the Glagolitic Mass.

Book a tour of Villa Tugendhat well in advance. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe completed the house in 1930, and its onyx wall and glass windows that sink into the floor helped make it a UNESCO World Heritage site. Janáček's own small house, in the garden of the organ school he founded, is open as a museum. The Reduta Theatre, where an 11-year-old Mozart performed in December 1767, hosts a festival concert on 31st October. On 11th November, St Martin's Day, Moravian wineries open their young wine at 11:11 in the morning, and restaurants across Brno serve it with roast goose, red cabbage and dumplings. For more wine, the Lednice-Valtice cultural landscape, a UNESCO-listed estate of palaces, follies and vineyards, is about an hour south. Brno is around 90 minutes by train from Vienna and two and a half hours from Prague.

## Ravenna, Italy: Mozart's final year told in three productions on consecutive nights

**13th to 17th November**

Ravenna Festival's Autumn Trilogy puts three productions on the stage of the Teatro Alighieri on consecutive nights, so a long weekend lets you see them all. This year's trilogy, 'Mozart 1791', follows the last year of Mozart's life, when the commissions kept arriving until his death in December. La clemenza di Tito plays on 13th and 16th November, L'ultimo incanto, an original piece built from The Magic Flute and his final compositions, on 14th and 17th November, and the Requiem on the afternoon of 15th November.

You will spend your days looking up. Ravenna was the capital of the Western Roman Empire and later of Theodoric's Ostrogothic kingdom, and eight of its early Christian monuments form a single UNESCO World Heritage site. In the Basilica of San Vitale, the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora face each other in mosaic across the apse, and next door the small Mausoleum of Galla Placidia has a deep blue ceiling scattered with gold stars. This year marks 1,500 years since Theodoric's death, and his mausoleum on the edge of the city is roofed with a single block of Istrian stone. Dante died in exile in Ravenna in 1321, and his tomb stands in a small chapel beside the Basilica of San Francesco. Eat piadina, the flatbread of Romagna, filled with soft squacquerone cheese and rocket, and drive 5 kilometres south to Sant'Apollinare in Classe, where a green mosaic meadow fills the apse. Ravenna is just over an hour by train from Bologna.

## Bergamo, Italy: Donizetti's festival ends on his birthday with three new productions

**13th to 29th November**

Donizetti Opera, now in its 12th edition and the second under artistic and musical director Riccardo Frizza, closes on 29th November, the composer's birthday. Three new productions play across three weekends, and each weekend runs all three on consecutive nights. L'esule di Roma, written in 1828 for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, opens the festival at the Teatro Donizetti on 13th November, with further performances on 21st and 29th November. Antonino Fogliani conducts, Katharina Thoma directs and the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni makes his Bergamo debut. Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali, a comedy about a provincial opera company in backstage chaos, plays on 15th, 20th and 28th November. Up in the old town, the Teatro Sociale stages Alahor in Granata on 14th, 22nd and 27th November from a new edition of Donizetti's handwritten score, which turned up in Palermo in 2023, almost two centuries after he wrote the opera for that city.

Take the funicular from the lower town up to Città Alta, the old city inside the 16th-century Venetian walls that UNESCO listed in 2017. Donizetti was born in a basement flat in Borgo Canale, just outside those walls, and the rooms are open to visitors. He is buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a few steps from the Teatro Sociale. The Accademia Carrara holds paintings by Raphael, Botticelli and Bellini. Bergamo's cooking is mountain food: order casoncelli, stuffed pasta served with butter, sage and pancetta, then polenta with a slice of Taleggio or the blue Strachitunt from the valleys to the north. Milan Bergamo Airport is about 15 minutes from the city centre, which makes this the easiest of the six festivals to reach for a weekend.

## Five operas in five nights: how to pair Bergamo and Ravenna

If you can give November a week, two of these festivals fit together. Spend the opening weekend in Bergamo for L'esule di Roma on 13th November, Alahor in Granata on 14th November and Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali on 15th November. On 16th November, take the train to Ravenna, around three and a half hours [via Milan and Bologna](https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/italy-road-trip-venice-como-cinque-terre-florence-val-dorcia), in time for La clemenza di Tito that evening and L'ultimo incanto on 17th November. You will have seen five productions in five nights, and you can spend both mornings in Ravenna among the mosaics.