Artistic Director Lotte de Beer and Music Director Ben Glassberg have joined forces at the Vienna Volksoper to build bridges between tradition and renewal, nostalgia and utopia. 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 2024/25 season

The 2024/25 schedule is once again packed full of a wide range of performances, including ten premieres. Here are some of the highlights:

• Freedom is one of the main themes in Georges Bizet’s Carmen.
• In The Marriage of Figaro, a young Mozart ensemble explores the themes of sex and power.
• The opera Alma by Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff features Alma Mahler-Werfel as Mother.
• Ralph Benatzky’s The White Horse Inn is turned into a political satire about tourism in Jan Philipp Gloger’s production starring Harald Schmidt and Robert Palfrader.
• Annette Dasch and Daniel Schmutzhard star in Emmerich Kálmán’s Csárdásfürstin (The Riviera Girl).
• Musical news: In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies, famous stars – portrayed by Drew Sarich and others – look back on their stage successes. My Fair Lady will be staged afresh. The cast will include Paula Nocker, Markus Meyer, Manuel Rubey and Karl Markovics.
• The Vienna State Ballet will perform the KaiserRequiem, an interweaving of Viktor Ullmann’s Kaiser von Atlantis (Emperor of Atlantis) with Mozart’s Requiem, and creations by three young choreographers: Alessandra Corti, Louis Stiens and Martin Chaix.

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. There will be three premieres in the 2024/25 season:

• The War of the Buttons tells the story of rival gangs of children and features chansons by Jaques Brel.
• Nureyev’s Dog has a mysterious talent.
• A new generation of the Vienna Volksoper’s opera workshop will perform for the first time when they present Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig.

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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!

On November 29, 2025, the world premiere of Aschenbrödel (Cinderella), a new family operetta with music based on Strauss’ ballet segment of the same name, will take place.

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…!"