Der Opernball - Wien - 2026/27

Volksoper Wien, Wien

Georges and Marguérite want to spice up their marriage once again, so they invite the newly engaged couple, Paul and Angèle, to their Paris apartment. Marguérite manages to persuade Angèle to take a fidelity test involving a partner swap: the women write two identical invitations to their respective husbands for a rendezvous with a mysterious “pink domino” at the Opera Ball. The invitations are delivered by the discreet maid Hortense, who cunningly writes a third, identical letter to Angèle’s sister Henriette. If only Aunt Palmira doesn’t find out about her nieces’ pranks! But wait a minute—where is Uncle Theophil, anyway…?

When Richard Heuberger premiered his first operetta, *Der Opernball*, in 1898, he was already 47 years old, but he was determined to revitalize the genre: it was to be graceful rather than vulgar, with more musical drama and fewer pop hits. Naturally, the old Wagnerian weaves leitmotifs into the airy music of his conversational operetta: thus, the fateful “pink domino” runs like an indiscreet thread through the entire score. In the seventh production of Heuberger’s classic at the Volksoper Wien, director Moritz Franz Beichl keeps *Der Opernball* set in Belle Époque Paris and sets out to uncover the crack in the veneer of perfect bourgeois married life.