La Cieca has been wining, dining and otherwise wooing her Met connection (pictured above) and he (or is it she?) has come across with some tidbits about upcoming seasons at Casa Gelb, detailed after the jump.

(Note: Updates to this post will be made in green.) Now, the 2014-2015 season is going to go off pretty much as predicted, except that Faust is not going to happen. Possibly a revival of Macbeth will take its place, though most likely without Anna Netrebko, whose Lady will not arrive in New York until… well, more on that later.

Anna’s also not going to sing Desdemona in the 2015-2016 opening night production of Otello, starring Alexsandrs Antonenko and Zeljko Lucic, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. No indication yet, as La Cieca’s waggish friend puts it, “which British Dame will direct.” The Russian diva will, however, appear in her customary two productions of the season, Il trovatore and Don Pasquale.  The Deborah Warner Messiah is not, in fact coming, replaced with a revival of Die Fledermaus, and Placido Domingo will extend his Met incumbency yet another year with a return engagement in Simon Boccanegra. UPDATE: The new production of Manon Lescaut will premiere this season, not next, and will feature Jonas Kaufmann and “another soprano” besides Netrebko.

Things are little more misty for 2016-2017, but the Dmitri Tcherniakov Rosenkavalier is a sure thing, with casting talk centering around Joyce DiDonato, Erin Morley and (speaking of “more farewells than Melba”) Renée Fleming.  That season also sees the long-awaited return of Guillaume Tell to the Met repertoire, a year earlier than originally projected, featuring Bryan Hymel/John Osborne, Angela Meade/Marina Rebeka and bass-baritone(s) TBA. Netrebko is featured in a revival of Onegin and a new repeat of the previous season’s Manon Lescaut.

With Tell out of the way, there’s room for another big Rossini in the 2017-2018 repertoire, which looks like it will be Semiramide with DiDonato in the title part. This presumably will be the year Netrebko’s Lady M arrives as well.

Between 2017 and 2019 plans are obviously very flexible. Stefan Herheim‘s Meistersinger is, as we know, on its way, but La Cieca’s source says the Met is “putting out feelers” for a new Lohengrin as well. Sometime (sooner rather than later) Diana Damrau and Vittorio Grigolo will team for new productions of Roméo et Juliette and Les pêcheurs de perles (directed by Mary Zimmerman), and, later rather than sooner, Anna will do Norma.

As you see, cher public, there are lots of gaps in these prognostications, and you, cadet reporters all, are encouraged to snoop and then divulge your findings to your doyenne.

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