Hop a steamboat up the Amazon with the Brazilian diva Florencia Grimaldi. She’s headed for the gemlike opera house of Manaus, inaugurated in 1897 by Enrico Caruso and captured unforgettably onscreen in 1982 in Werner Herzog’s mad Fitzcarraldo. A tribute to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera), Florencia en el Amazonas was the first Spanish-language opera to be commissioned by a major U.S. institution—or rather by three, the flagship opera companies of Houston, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Since its premiere in 1996, this melodic, atmospheric property has become an audience favorite. High time the Metropolitan Opera came aboard—and it’s doing so in grand style. The glamorous Ailyn Pérez, in her glory, stars as the diva in a new production by Mary Zimmerman, whose stage images are pure poetry. —Matthew Gurewitsch

The Met: Live in HD presents a live transmission of Florencia en el Amazonas on Saturday, December 9, at 12:55 P.M. E.T.