Artistic Director Lotte de Beer is building bridges between tradition and innovation, nostalgia and utopia at the Vienna Volksoper. De Beer’s vision:

"My goal is to be able to call the Volksoper a house of the artists, a house of the audience. An establishment where people can be seduced, where they are invited to reflect and where they can laugh with no inhibition."

The prerequisites are perfect, since variety and proximity to the audience are part of the theater's DNA. Nowhere else in Vienna can opera, operetta, musicals and dance be found together on a single stage. We look forward to new artists and works, but also to the popular and familiar.

© WienTourismus/Gregor Hofbauer

Highlights of the 2025/26 Season

Once again, the 2025/26 program is packed with a wide range of offerings, including no fewer than eleven premieres. Here are some of the highlights:

• Mozart’s The Magic Flute: a beloved classic in a new, imaginative production by Lotte de Beer and Ben Glassberg

• In Killing Carmen, Bizet’s music merges with jazz, flamenco, and pop.

• The Pirates of Penzance: one of the quirkiest British operettas by Gilbert & Sullivan, absurd à la Monty Python

• Franz Lehár’s operetta The Tsarevich as a live animated silent film

• Jacques Offenbach’s final work: The Tales of Hoffmann

• Musical News: the award-winning rock musical Spring Awakening, based on Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening

• The Vienna State Ballet will perform Marie Antoinette by Thierry Malandain to music by Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck, as well as American Signatures, combining choreographies by Jerome Robbins and Lar Lubovitch. A highlight: the revival of the ballet Peter Pan.

For young audiences

Almost a quarter of audience members at the Volksoper are under 30 years old, so there is also a lot going on in the Junge Volksoper program. A few tips on which shows would be particularly suitable for the whole family:

• Mozart’s Magic Flute

• My Fair Lady – musical by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner 

• The War of the Buttons – music theater for the whole family

• Hansel and Gretel – Opera by Engelbert Humperdinck

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200th anniversary of Johann Strauss’ birth

The Vienna Volksoper will also be celebrating the 200th birthday of The Waltz King, Johann Strauss Sohn (1825-1899). Strauss’ Die Fledermaus is a classic and a permanent fixture in the schedule. The Viennese traditionally celebrate New Year’s Eve with this, the most famous operetta in the world. However, Die Fledermaus is not the only Strauss work on the program at the Volksoper.

The premiere of Johann Strauss’ operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) will take place exactly 200 years to the day since the composer’s birth (Saturday, October 25, 2025). Happy Birthday!

Cinderella’s Dream, a new family operetta with music based on an excerpt from the Strauss’ ballet of the same name, will premiere on November 29, 2025.

And in June 2026 – during Pride Month – a queer perspective will be cast on Die Fledermaus – as Pride Edition.

Strauss locations in Vienna

History of the house

The present-day Vienna Volksoper was opened in 1898 as the "Emperor's Anniversary City Theater" and initially run as a lyric theater only. Operas and musical comedies were subsequently added to the program in 1903. World-famous singers such as Maria Jeritza, Leo Slezak, and Richard Tauber performed here, and Alexander Zemlinsky worked here as conductor.

At selected operettas and musicals, subtitles in English bring the show's action a bit closer to non-German speaking visitors; after all, "The whole world loves operetta…!"