Works by Camille Saint-Saëns, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Pietro Mascagni, Robert Schumann, and others.
Opening of the new directorship
The Zurich Opera House is celebrating the opening of the 2025/26 season under its new artistic director for an entire weekend, spanning from a song recital with Elīna Garanča and the new artistic director Matthias Schulz at the piano to an extended opening festival, during which the house is open 24 hours a day and can be discovered in a very unusual way, to the first major premiere with Strauss' opera «Der Rosenkavalier». The first world premiere from the new series of laboratory productions at the Bernhard Theater also marks the start of the season.
Program of the Opening Weekend
Opening celebration «24hOpernhaus»
Free admission
For one night and one day at the opera house. The new season, under new artistic direction, will be celebrated this year with a one-of-a-kind event. On the first weekend of the season, visitors will have the opportunity to discover Zurich's historic landmark in an unusual way over the course of 24 hours. The opera house will open its doors from Friday at 11 p.m. to Saturday at 11 p.m., inviting everyone into a very special world and offering a chance to experience the house from an entirely new perspective.
World premiere of «Wie du warst! Wie du bist!»
Music theater by Simon Steen-Andersen
«Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding», says the Marschallin in «Der Rosenkavalier», «manchmal hör’ ich sie fliessen.» For the season opening, Simon Steen-Andersen sets out in search of this «sound of time». His journey leads him deep down into the understage and into the intertwined stories of the Zurich Opera House and its younger counterpart, the Bernhard Theater. Like in a fever dream, the boundaries blur between fiction and reality, past and present, opera and life. Playfully, the composer and director links the premiere titles of the Opera House with the formats of the Bernhard Theater. At the center of the evening stands the singer Liliana Nikiteanu – a member of the Opera House ensemble for 34 years. A journey through time and memory, between the subconscious and the understage.
From 20. September
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Premiere «Der Rosenkavalier»
Richard Strauss
With the «Rosenkavalier», set in an imagined Rococo Vienna yet closely tied to the decadent fin de siècle, Strauss and Hofmannsthal created a profound social comedy. Not without melancholy, the Marschallin lets her young lover Octavian go when he falls head over heels for Sophie, the daughter of the bourgeois Faninal family. As lush as Strauss’s score is, it becomes equally delicate in moments of dream and melancholy. Director Lydia Steier stages Strauss’s opera based on an aesthetic concept by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. Diana Damrau sings the role of the Marschallin. Joana Mallwitz, chief conductor at the Konzerthaus Berlin, conducts the Orchestra of the Zurich Opera.
From 21. September
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