“The Met: Live in HD,” the Metropolitan Opera’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series of live performance transmissions into movie theatres around the world, will expand in its fifth season to 1,500 theatres (an increase of 300 theatres), while adding Egypt, Portugal and Spain to its network of now 46 participating countries.

The new season will also feature 12 live transmissions, the most so far in a single season, beginning on Oct. 9 with the Met’s new production of Das Rheingold, directed by Robert Lepage and conducted by James Levine.

During the previous 2009-10 season, a record-breaking 2.4 million “Live in HD” tickets were sold worldwide for nine transmissions, effectively tripling the Met’s paying audience. (Approximately 800,000 people attend performances in the opera house in a Met season.)

One hundred of the additional theatres are being added in the U.S, making the total number of U.S. theatres 620 this season. Canada has added 35 theatres, Germany more than 60, and the United Kingdom 30 locations.

“Our live transmissions have made grand opera more accessible and popular,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager and the executive producer of the live transmissions. “They have helped to make it possible for opera to continue to flourish in a difficult economic time.”

The Met’s nine transmissions sold $48 million in tickets last season, with the Met receiving 50% of the gross box-office revenues.

The transmissions use up to six different satellites and the operas can be seen live in the U.S., Canada, Latin America and Europe, where the starting time of the operas is usually 1 p.m. ET in New York.

In addition to Wagner’s Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the upcoming season features four other new productions: Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (Oct. 23) starring René Pape; Verdi’s Don Carlo (Dec. 11) with Roberto Alagna in the title role, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and directed by Nicholas Hytner; John Adams’ Nixon in China (Feb. 12), with Adams conducting his own work, directed by Peter Sellars, and starring James Maddalena as Nixon; and Bartlett Sher’s new production of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory (April 9), starring Juan Diego Flórez and conducted by Maurizio Benini.

James Levine will conduct two other revivals in the series: Donizetti’s comedy Don Pasquale (November 13) starring Anna Netrebko, and Verdi’s Il Trovatore (April 30), with Sondra Radvanovsky and Marcelo Álvarez. Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (Jan. 8), starring Deborah Voigt in the title role, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the opera’s world premiere at the Met.

The series also includes three of the world’s best-known singers in highly acclaimed roles from recent seasons: Susan Graham and Plácido Domingo in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (Feb. 26); Natalie Dessay as the mad heroine in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (March 19), and Renée Fleming as the Countess in Strauss’s Capriccio, adding a new role to her Met repertory (April 23).

All 12 high-definition productions will be shown live worldwide on Saturdays through May 14, with most encore presentations in the United States shown on Wednesdays, 18 days following the live exhibition.

For more information, visit www.metopera.org.