Season 2025/26

This coming season will not be an easy one, primarily due to the conditions that all Berlin cultural institutions find themselves confronted with. Despite the cuts that will necessarily have an impact on our artistic activities, we have assembled a rich, top-notch program for the 2025/26 season that will once again show the wealth of European musical culture. Five major opera premiers will be featured along with two dozen productions from the repertoire and numerous concerts. The season will open with two performances of Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle in the conceptually and technically complex staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov, conducted by general music director Christian Thielemann.

The season’s first premiere is dedicated to Jacques Offenbach’s fantastic opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), which hasn’t been performed for several decades at Berlin’s Staatsoper. Lydia Steier will direct this production, with Bertrand de Billy conducting. With the premiere of a new opera by Matthias Pintscher, Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart) loosely based on a fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff, we will show once again our commitment to contemporary opera. The composer will conduct the performance himself, while the opera and film director James Darrah will prepare the production jointly with his team. The opera company’s interest for the unique operas of Leoš Janáček will continue this season with a new production of The Cunning Little Vixen, directed by Ted Huffman, who in recent years has made a name for himself as one of the most original theater directors of his generation, and conducted once again by Simon Rattle. For the Festtage in the spring, Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera will come to the stage of the Staatsoper, an outstanding work from Verdi’s “middle” period with Enrique Mazzola as conductor, Rafael Villalobos as director, and an excellent cast. The last premiere planned for next season is a new interpretation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Singspiel Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), conducted by our former Staatskapellmeister Thomas Guggeis, the current GMD of the Oper Frankfurt, together with Andrea Moses as director.

To ease the financial situation, our GMD Christian Thielemann will cancel a premiere that he had planned, and in its stead conduct a renewed performance of Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), which will be performed for the first time at the end of the 2024/25 season. In addition, he will be conducting not only the Ring but also performances of another Strauss comic opera, Der Rosenkavalier for the Festtage 2026, and the renewed performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, one of the most important operas of the twentieth century and a virtual icon of Weimar culture, commemorating its world premiere at this opera house a century ago. A two-day conference to mark this centennial anniversary will be held in the Apollosaal.

The opera repertoire stretches from the Baroque, with a renewed performance of Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, a collaboration with our trusted Berlin partners Compagnie Sasha Waltz and Guests and Akademie für Alte Musik, to opera “classics” by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini, and works from the twentieth century, in German, Italian, French, Russian and English.

After the success of our new Freischütz für Kinder (The Marksman, for Kids), we will once again include this production in the new season’s program, enabling a young audience their first (or perhaps renewed) contact with the fascinating art form of opera that we treasure so much. Our program, which will include more than 160 opera performances, more than twenty major concerts with Staatskapelle Berlin, several smaller concert formats, and numerous projects of the Junge Staatsoper and our education department, offers a rich variety with which we hope to inspire you. We look forward to seeing you this season, for music and the opera only take on meaning with communication and lively exchange.

Welcome to the new 2025/26 season!
Elisabeth Sobotka & Christian Thielemann

The rest of the concert programme for the new season also bears the signature of the General Music Director. In addition to three Staatskapelle Berlin symphony concerts, Christian Thielemann will also conduct the New Year's concert, the special concert ‘Musik aus fernen Rundfunktagen’ and, for the third time in a row, the open-air concert at ‘Staatsoper für alle’ on 24 May 2026 on Bebelplatz. Music by Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Strauss and Lehár, among others, will be performed.

Excellent conductors and soloists will perform in eight double concerts at the two central venues, with classics of the repertoire as well as works that invite discovery or new encounters. In his three programmes, General Music Director Christian Thielemann will continue his exploration of the orchestral songs of Richard Strauss and the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt, as well as performances of Brahms' Ein deutsches
Requiem, Beethoven's Pastorale and Hans Pfitzner's rarely heard Piano Concerto. Simon Rattle returns for a performance of Mahler's monumental Symphony No. 2, while François-Xavier Roth dedicades himself to music by Ravel and Mendelssohn Bartholdy. One of Mendelssohn's major works, the Schottische Sinfonie, will be conducted by Alan Gilbert. Elim Chan and Nathalie Stutzmann, will kick off the season with two important symphonies by Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.