25.09.25

Did you also feel that something was different?

With 9 new works, 60 locations, and 173 individual events, it’s safe to say that Copenhagen was overflowing with opera in 2025.

And more than 31,000 people came to experience it. Here, you can read more about what made this year’s festival so special. For 10 festival days, opera filled the city’s theatres and everything from the canals and neighbourhoods of Copenhagen to private apartments, Christians Kirke, Aveny-T, the nightclub Basement, and Tivoli Gardens.

The Minister of Culture: “A model example”

On Den Røde Plads in Nørrebro, Minister of Culture Jakob Engel-Schmidt took to the stage in front of a packed festival crowd. More than 3,300 people had gathered to experience a top-tier opera classic: Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus’ concert version of Carmen.

Surrounded by an orchestra ready to perform, the Minister highlighted Copenhagen Opera Festival as a model example of innovative cultural programming — where, under the open sky, anyone who shows up is treated to a free taste of opera and met right where they are.

And that is precisely what the festival achieved in 2025. With excursions to cities such as Helsingør, Møn, Smukfest, and Aarhus Festival, there were more chances than ever to experience opera beyond Copenhagen.

10,000 more than in 2024

It’s a chance the audience clearly embraced.

This year, more than 31,000 people attended one or more performances — a 50 percent increase from last year’s 21,000 visitors.vAnd the festival’s growing popularity can’t be explained by the weather alone.

The large open-air stage on Den Røde Plads attracted more than 10,000 people this year.

In addition, the festival introduced new audience-participation formats such as Salen taler (“The Hall Speaks”), where visitors could discuss their opera experiences with one another.

A total of nine newly composed works, three sold-out concerts in Tivoli, and the festival’s roaming city performances also helped draw record audiences.

“A wonderful and slightly mad idea”

The family version of Richard Wagner’s monumental work The Ring turned out to be a huge success. This intense operatic drama played 52 sold-out performances for children aged 7–12 and their parents.

It also received rave reviews from an enthusiastic press corps, who called the idea of performing Wagner for children in just one hour “a wonderful and slightly mad idea”, predicting that it would make the youngest audiences think opera is cool.

And don’t worry if you missed The Ring this year – it will return in 2026 and later go on a nationwide tour with the Danish National Opera (Den Jyske Opera).

New Perspectives on Opera

This year, critics highlighted how the festival turned its gaze away from opera’s traditional themes of fate and tragedy, giving space instead to intimate, music-dramatic experiments exploring identity, domestic violence, the climate crisis, and mental health.

Perhaps this renewed focus helps explain the festival’s growing audience – it offers new ways forward for the classical genre.

The 2025 programme featured a remarkably balanced repertoire, giving extra prominence to contemporary artists and local opera creators. In fact, 72.1% of the repertoire consisted of new music, with 48% composed by Danish composers and 45% by women.

At the same time, the festival shed light on overlooked chapters of Danish opera history, such as Tekla Griebel’s forgotten grand opera Kong Hroars Skjalde and the Freezing Italians concert with baroque specialists Concerto Copenhagen — works that truly deserved renewed attention.

Opera in 2025 was an art form filled with new insights and moments of revelation, filling venues across the city.

So if you, dear reader, feel the same as the arts magazine Seismograf, which wrote:

“I don’t know what Danish opera would do without the Copenhagen Opera Festival,”

— don’t despair!

Copenhagen Opera Festival returns 14–23 August 2026.