Berlin State Opera

Stand on the open square in front of the building and listen for a moment. Traffic hums along Unter den Linden behind you. Footsteps cross the wide paving stones. Then your eye settles on a pale, calm facade, with a row of tall columns holding up a triangular pediment. This is the Berlin State Opera, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. It is one of the oldest opera houses in Germany, and it has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once.

The story begins with a young king. Frederick the Second of Prussia, later called Frederick the Great, came to the throne in 1740. He loved music. He played the flute and composed his own pieces. Almost at once, he ordered a grand opera house for his capital. His friend and architect, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, designed it in a restrained classical style. The house opened in December 1742, before it was even fully finished.

Look up at the portico, the covered entrance with its columns. Across the top runs a Latin inscription: Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis. It means "King Frederick, to Apollo and the Muses". Apollo was the Greek god of music and poetry, and the Muses were the goddesses of the arts. So the king did not dedicate this building to himself. He dedicated it to art. It is a small detail, but it says a lot about how Frederick wanted to be seen.

The opera house was only one part of a bigger plan. Frederick imagined a whole cultural district here, sometimes called the Forum Fridericianum. Turn around slowly and you can see what grew from that idea. The green copper dome of Saint Hedwig's Cathedral rises in one corner. The curved facade of the Old Royal Library stands opposite. Berliners nicknamed it "the chest of drawers" because of its swelling shape. Across the boulevard stands Humboldt University.

Here is the first surprise. The building in front of you is not quite the building Frederick saw. In 1843, a fire swept through the opera house and gutted the interior. The architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans rebuilt it, and the king of the day insisted the outer look stay close to the original. That pattern of loss and careful return would repeat. Again and again, Berliners chose to rebuild this house, rather than replace it with something new.

The twentieth century was far harder. During the Second World War, bombs struck the opera house in 1941. It was rebuilt and reopened during the war itself. Then, near the end of the war, it was hit again and badly destroyed. When the fighting stopped, this part of the city lay in the Soviet sector. The opera house would now belong to East Berlin.

The East German state made rebuilding the opera a priority. The architect Richard Paulick led the work, and the house reopened in 1955. He kept Knobelsdorff's classical exterior. Inside, he created a richly decorated auditorium in a style that recalled the eighteenth century. For decades, while the Berlin Wall divided the city, this was one of the leading stages of the East. Audiences came here for opera, ballet and concerts, only a short walk from the border.

Now for the second surprise, and it is about sound. After German reunification, the old building needed deep repair. A long renovation began in 2010, and the company moved temporarily to the Schiller Theater in western Berlin. The work took far longer than planned, and the costs rose sharply. One key change is invisible from outside. The ceiling of the auditorium was raised by several metres. A new gallery was added above. The aim was to give the music more space to ring and to make the hall sound fuller.

The house finally reopened in October 2017. If you go inside, you will still see the warm red, cream and gold tones of the postwar hall. But the sound now has more air around it. Many visitors never guess that the room above their heads was rebuilt to change how the music travels. The orchestra that plays here is the Staatskapelle Berlin. Its roots reach back to a court ensemble of the sixteenth century, which makes it one of the oldest orchestras in the world.

Great conductors have shaped this house. Richard Strauss conducted here in the early twentieth century. Much later, Daniel Barenboim led the Staatsoper for about three decades, from the early 1990s, and became closely linked with its identity after reunification. In 2024, Christian Thielemann took over as general music director. Each era has left its sound in the orchestra. When you hear the Staatskapelle, you hear centuries of players passing the music on.

Before you leave the square, walk toward its centre and look down. Set into the paving is a clear glass panel. Through it you can see an underground room lined with empty white bookshelves. This is a memorial by the artist Micha Ullman. It marks the night of 10 May 1933, when Nazi students and officials burned thousands of books on this very square. Among them were works by Jewish, socialist and other banned writers.

The shelves below can hold many thousands of books, but every shelf is empty. Nearby, a plaque carries a line written by the poet Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century. It warns that where people burn books, they will in the end also burn people. It is a hard thing to read on a square built for music. Yet the two belong together here. The opera house shows what the city chose to rebuild. The empty library shows what it must never forget.

So take one last look at the facade. Notice how the pale stone catches the light, and how quiet the columns look against the sky. If it is evening, you may see people arriving in good clothes, and hear the doors open and close. As you walk back toward the trees of Unter den Linden, remember the king's words above the door. To Apollo and the Muses. After fire, war and division, the dedication still stands.