Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou. Recently, Francesca Zambello received a disturbing text from a singer in Washington National Opera’s production of Macbeth who’d gone to the Kennedy Center on the morning of its planned final performance: It was raining in the Opera House. Zambello, the company’s artistic director, rushed over and found water “cascading through the chandeliers,” she says. Something had triggered the sprinklers, and the “Scottish Play” was in danger of being presented under authentic Scottish weather conditions. George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium was available, so the opera picked up the Thane of Glamis and moved him, an orchestra, and a company of singers a half mile east for what Zambello calls a “semi-staged event”—no scenery, no orchestra pit, just musicians and singers onstage. During her curtain speech, Zambello told the audience, “Now you have something to talk about at Thanksgiving.” Lately, people have been talking about Washington National Opera for other reasons, too. After premiering much-discussed new operas like Blue and Grounded, it’s also welcoming an acclaimed new music director, Robert Spano. This month, WNO will present three intriguing 20-minute operas com­missioned for the American Opera Initiative, a program Zambello created to identify and support promising talent. We spoke on a video call because she had a sore throat and was worried she might pass it on. “I live in the land of paranoid singers,” she explained. Mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo in Grounded in 2023. Photograph by Scott Suchman . You’ve been putting on operas for more than 40 years: Your first mention in the Washington Post was in 1984, when you were praised for your “fine stage direction” of Rossini’s Cinderella for the Baltimore Opera Company. Where was your career at that point? Wow. That was definitely in the beginning. You know, I was only 17 when I did that. Just joking. I was at that point an assistant director at the San Francisco Opera. I worked for a lot of different directors, and the Baltimore Opera Company was very small then. The guy who hired me said, “I’m giving you a little break here.” Was it unusual to get a break in opera back then if you weren’t a white man? I mostly think, like anybody, I got a lot of good breaks because I was talented and persistent. And of course there were definitely no women role models in the field, really, that I could look to at that point. Now it’s very different terrain. How did you decide to go into directing if it seemed so closed off? You do what you believe in when you’re that age. You just go forth. I don’t think we thought about discrimination, sexism, racism then like we do now. Opera was certainly a very, very white art form. I will say I got a lot more work in Europe through the ’80s and ’90s—they were just more receptive. I also speak a couple of languages, and that definitely helps. Is the opera world like other multi­national concerns like Formula 1, where people tend to communicate in English? Now it is. I speak French, Italian, German, and Russian, and I would always speak in the language of the country. I think that really helps. With Gen-Z, everybody just speaks English. With social media and because of the internet, that became the lingua franca. A big casting policy I’ve had my whole time is that 50 percent of the people onstage cannot be white. I didn’t announce it; I just did it. That’s good for Americans! You’re unusual–most of us speak one language. We tend to hire more American artists, because I believe in the “national” part of our name. But of course you also want to have international people, or people who might be debuting roles like the baritone who sang Macbeth [Canadian Étienne Dupuis]. He had never sung it. So that’s part of our casting ethos: to hire more Americans and people who may not have been in those kinds of roles. The other big casting policy I’ve had my whole time is that 50 percent of the people onstage cannot be white. I didn’t announce it; I just did it. Some people clock it and some don’t. I think that’s also why our audience is much more diverse than most opera companies. What have you noticed about audiences since the pandemic? Like everyone, our numbers are less than before Covid. We’re doing very well compared to a lot of our colleagues. We sell out a lot of shows. But we have less content. I’ve got to confess: It’s kind of one big show less a year. Have people noticed that? We’re doing lots of smaller shows, medium-sized shows, so that people have more. You want to be in front of your audience from the fall till the spring. Which brings me to Cry Wolf, one of the short operas you’ll present soon. It’s about how various types of media can push young men rightward, politically. That seems prescient. Well, what we try to do through programming is—something can always have a contemporary message. It might speak to contemporary sentiments even if it’s a period production. I mean, Macbeth is about a despot, so obviously that makes you think about it. Fidelio, we just did. We ended up gender-bending the final character, who’s the new leader. But you plan productions long in advance. You couldn’t have foreseen, for example, that George Floyd’s murder would trigger a national conversation about police violence when you commissioned Blue [an opera by Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson]. I feel like we’ve been ahead of the curve a lot of the time. Blue is performing in Chicago right now. It’s still hitting home. I think it’s part of my job as a creative leader to try and think about how can we make art speak to society or help change society or think about things. Do you get to know the opera’s subscribers? We don’t know each and every one. Donors we certainly know. I mean, I know a lot of subscribers. I get a lot of mail. I never don’t answer an email. What do they write to you about? Today was a couple of emails. Most people were really happy about the [last-minute Macbeth concert at Lisner]. I had one cranky person who was like, Why didn’t you do this, this, and this? I just wrote back a nice letter. And I reminded him that we had offered everyone a refund. Letters like that do show passion. Well, you are so right. That’s what I al­ways say: “I appreciate your passion. I may not be totally on your page, but I am grateful that you care this much.” Is opera different from musicals in that way–attracting more fervent fans? No, musicals have their own set of, you know, musical nuts. But opera—it connects to the voice, I think. How do you mean? The voice is a primal communicator. That’s why musicals and opera and communicating through song, which is not a naturalistic thing—you speak, you don’t sing—somehow connect on some level for people. I don’t know if I’m explaining it well, but I do believe in the passion of people who follow all musical art forms—particularly the voice, more than getting that excited about a bassoon concerto. Do you have time to see a lot of music? I live in DC and in New York City. I go to Broadway all the time. I go to the Met. When I travel, a lot of times I like to see things in other places [to get a sense of] the audience. Because understanding audiences is so difficult. Sometimes something is so successful somewhere and flops somewhere else. I believe in the moment of [a performance] being live very much. And that’s something that is diminishing: Getting people to come to the theater is difficult. It used to be that people would gather no matter what. And now people don’t want to gather; they want to burrow down. It’s so many different things: economics, pricing, inclusion. There’s a million reasons. And obviously the internet. I’ve long thought that anytime the internet gives us something good, it also gives us something equally bad. Yeah. But, you know, you’re talking about the passion of operagoers: After a show when we do a Q&A, we’ll usually get a couple hundred people to hang around. I’m always impressed, especially in Washington, because it’s not like New York, where everybody’s at work by 10:15, 10:30. I’m thinking, “Oh, all these people, they have to be at work early!” RelatedHow a Hit Play Made Me Confront My Family’s Tragic History   This article appears in the January 2025 issue of Washingtonian.The post How Washington National Opera’s Francesca Zambello Handles a Big Job first appeared on Washingtonian.