Munich Opera Festival 2026

Munich Opera Festival 2026

18.6.–31.7.2026

Following the big anniversary in 2025 celebrating the foundation stone-laying 150 years ago for today’s Munich Opera Festival with the “Festive Summer” as it was known, the entire plenitude of musical theatre, ballet and concerts will also be enjoyed again in 2026. The arc is spread wide here: From baroque, with Georg Friedrich Händel’s Alcina as a festival premiere in the Prinzregententheater to 19th century opera classics, through to contemporary musical theatre. The season’s world premiere therefore returns to the Nationaltheater with Brett Dean’s Of One Blood. With the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, following the celebrated Rheingold staging, Tobias Kratzer and Vladimir Jurowski are now continuing their collaboration on the new Munich Ring des Nibelungen production. The Konstellationen ballet premiere presents classical and contemporary ballets, and in our recital performances and chamber concerts you have the opportunity to enjoy music in more intimate surroundings.

AlCINA

Dramma per musica in three acts (1735) | Premiere 13. July 2026
Composer, Georg Friedrich Handel. Libretto by an unknown author based on the libretto by Antonio Fanzaglia for the L’isola di Alcina opera by Riccardo Broschi, based on the 6th and 7th songs from the Orlando furioso epic piece by Ludovico Ariosto.

FESTIVAL-FOCUS: PLÄDOYERS (PLEAS)

Musical theatre invites us to understand the individual human handling of the characters on the stage, to identify with them as spectators or to reject their actions – as a mirror image of our own search for identity and purpose. As part of our Festival Focus debate series, entitled “Plädoyers” (Pleas), we aim to reflect on the decisions, the freedom and responsibility of iconic opera characters before the respective performances. Against the background of justice and injustice, from various disciplines we approach not only the power struggle of the two queens, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I from Of One Blood, which peaks on the stage in a courtroom scene and an execution. The fact that in Wagner’s Walküre Brünnhilde defies her father’s divine order, effectively to guarantee Siegfried’s future and thus ultimately also humanity’s future, confronts us with the issue of moral responsibility, as do Leonore’s self-empowerment in Ludwig van Beethoven’s opera of liberation, Fidelio, or in Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz, Max’s union with diabolical forces, in order to assert himself within an outdated social structure.

ADVANCE BOOKING MUNICH OPERA FESTIVAL

Binding written orders for the Munich Opera Festival (via online form on the website of the Bavarian State Opera) are now possible. Processing will begin on Sun, 01.02.26. All festival orders are expected to be processed by mid-March 2025. Online, telephone and box office sales of all remaining tickets will begin on Fri, 27.03.26. The date of the traditional first sale and the issue of waiting numbers will be announced in the Festival brochure.

18.6.–31.7.2026

Die WALKÜRE

AlCINA

KONSTELLATIONEN

Dates

FESTIVAL-FOCUS: PLÄDOYERS (PLEAS)

ADVANCE BOOKING MUNICH OPERA FESTIVAL