Sumitted photo A scene from Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is pictured.

Live at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera’s award-winning series of live, high definition opera transmissions to theaters around the world, returns for the 2021-22 season at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House Performing Arts Center on Saturday at 1 p.m. with Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

It marks the first satellite transmission of a live Met performance since the revered venue closed due to COVID in March 2020.

All patrons to wear masks before, during and after Opera House events.

Bass Rene Pape, the world’s reigning Boris, reprises his overwhelming portrayal of the tortured tsar caught between grasping ambition and crippling paranoia. Conductor Sebastian Weigle leads Mussorgsky’s masterwork, a pillar of the Russian repertoire, in its original one-act version from 1869. Stephen Wadsworth’s affecting production poignantly captures the hope and suffering of the Russian people as well as the tsar himself.

The opera takes place in Russia between 1598 and 1605, an immensely turbulent time following the end of the Rurik dynasty and preceding the emergence of the Romanov dynasty. Scene IV is set on the Russian border with Lithuania, but the rest of the opera is set in and around Moscow. Several of the places specified in the libretto can still be seen today, including the Kremlin’s Terem Palace, which is now the official residence of the Russian president.

A pinnacle of the Russian operatic canon, Boris Godunov operates on both the most epic and the most intimate levels, with huge crowd scenes and monumental monologues juxtaposed with snippets of smaller (but crucial) folk-based melodies. At the drama’s core stands the titular tsar – a complex, nuanced figure who is both a hero and a villain, a summit of the bass repertory, and an utterly engrossing character. The opera runs two hours, 20 minutes with no intermission.

Live at the Met telecasts are now shown in more than 2,000 theaters in 73 countries across six continents, making the Met the only arts institution with an ongoing global art series of this scale. The Met was the first arts company to experiment with this type of broadcast, beginning on a modest scale in 2006 and growing every season since then, with more than 27 million tickets sold to date.

Individual tickets to each of the operas in the season are $20, $18 for Opera House members and $10 students. A subscription of eight tickets which can be used a variety of ways — one at a time to eight different operas, all at once for eight people, or anything in between — and is available for $142. Tickets may be purchased in person at the Opera House Box Office or by phone at 679-1891 from noon to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Tickets may be purchased online anytime at www.fredopera.org.

The Opera House is equipped with assistive listening headsets for the hearing-impaired. Request one from any usher or Opera House staff member.