Graz Opera House
Neo-baroque house of 1899 by Fellner and Helmer, staging opera, operetta, musicals and ballet.
Graz lost its old theatre to fire in 1823 and campaigned for decades for a new one. The Viennese partnership of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, who built theatres across central Europe, designed the present house on the ring at Kaiser-Josef-Platz, and it opened on 16 September 1899 with Schiller's Wilhelm Tell and Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris. The exterior is restrained neo-baroque, while the auditorium and foyers are decorated in a lighter rococo manner.
The house seats roughly 1,150 people and is the second largest opera house in Austria. It was damaged in the Second World War, reopened in 1945 and was thoroughly modernised between 1983 and 1985. Today it is run by Buehnen Graz alongside the Schauspielhaus and Next Liberty, with its own opera company, ballet and the Grazer Philharmoniker, and it plays opera, operetta, musicals and dance on the main stage and in a studio.
Highlights
- Neo-baroque house of 1899 by Fellner and Helmer
- Rococo-style auditorium seating about 1,150
- Home of the Grazer Philharmoniker and the opera ballet
- Opera, operetta, musicals and dance on the main stage and in a studio
