Qualla: Cologne Opera

Cologne Opera: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 24 January 1975, a young American jazz pianist named Keith Jarrett walked onstage at Cologne Opera House. He was exhausted, he had eaten badly, the borrowed piano he was given to play was small, out of tune, and missing several working pedals. The concert had been organized by a seventeen-year-old promoter. Jarrett very nearly cancelled. He sat down anyway, started improvising, and over the next hour produced a recording - The Köln Concert - that would become the best-selling solo piano album of all time and one of the best-selling jazz albums in history. The opera house on Offenbachplatz was eighteen years old that night. It would not have many more such evenings in its current life: in 2010, the building closed for what was supposed to be a five-year renovation. Fifteen years later, the renovation is still going on.

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Cologne Opera: Riphahn's Modernist Box

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cologne's opera company is much older than its house. A permanent company was established in 1822, performing first in a small private theatre and later in two purpose-built houses that successive bombing raids destroyed. After the war, the company performed wherever it could - a...

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Cologne Opera: A Stage for New Work

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Riphahn's modernist house was matched by a post-war repertoire that liked to take chances. The Cologne company became known for premiering new operas - roughly one per season - and for staging older works in deliberately controversial ways. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten p...

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Cologne Opera: Jarrett's Piano

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The piano Keith Jarrett was given on the night of 24 January 1975 was supposed to be a concert grand. What arrived was a small Bosendorfer baby grand intended for rehearsals, badly out of tune in the upper register, with sluggish action and broken pedals. The seventeen-year-old p...

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Cologne Opera: The Renovation That Wouldn't End

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the end of the 2009-2010 season, both Riphahn buildings - the opera and the playhouse - closed for renovation. The reopening was scheduled for November 2015. That date came and went. So did several more. The company kept performing, but in increasingly improvised venues: a con...

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Cologne Opera: Music Directors and Memory

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The list of music directors at Cologne reads like a history of 20th-century German conducting. Otto Klemperer held the post from 1917 to 1924. After the war came Günter Wand, Wolfgang Sawallisch, István Kertész, John Pritchard, James Conlon, Markus Stenz, and most recently Franço...

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