Oper Köln

Cologne lost its neo-baroque 1902 opera house by Carl Moritz to wartime bombing, and the city answered with one of the boldest theatres of the young Federal Republic. Wilhelm Riphahn's angular new house on Offenbachplatz opened on 8 May 1957 with Weber's Oberon, with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a former mayor of Cologne, in the audience. The building became a listed monument of postwar modernism and earned a reputation for adventurous programming, including the 1965 world premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten.

Since 2015 the company has performed in the StaatenHaus, a converted exhibition hall across the Rhine in Deutz, while the Riphahn building undergoes a renovation that has stretched over a decade, with costs climbing toward 1.5 billion euros; the return to Offenbachplatz is planned for 2026. Mozart has travelled along: Die Zauberflöte features in the company's current repertoire, staged in the unconventional halls of its interim home.

On stage here

Performance dates

Video

Oper Köln | DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE Trailer

Data: open sources (opera houses, ticketing platforms, Wikidata). Part of the worldwide Die Zauberflöte map.