Opera Australia

Opera Australia is the nation’s premier opera company and one of its most important cultural institutions. Our ambition is to bring an Australian stamp to sharing great stories through music and song, and with a commitment to develop and nurture new generations of Australian talent on and off the stage.

We acknowledge, celebrate, and respect all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first storytellers who carry the cultural wisdom, traditions, and Dreaming of this ancient land.

Each year our company stages critically acclaimed operas, musicals and concerts attended by hundreds of thousands of people, predominantly in our two performance homes: the Sydney Opera House and the Arts Centre Melbourne. Opera Australia also stages exceptional and critically acclaimed performances in other venues in Australia’s major cities and regional communities across the country – from the Northern Territory to Warrnambool and Wyong, and from Burnie to Bendigo.

Based in Sydney at The Opera Centre in Surry Hills, and with offices and rehearsal facilities in the Melbourne Arts Precinct, we collaborate with other Australian opera companies and arts organisations, and co-produce work with some of the world’s most renowned opera houses and producers of musical theatre.

Opera Australia is the largest performing arts employer in Australia’s $64 billion cultural and creative industries. Our company includes opera singers, conductors, orchestral musicians, coaches and répétiteurs with teams also working in the areas of scenic construction and painting, lighting, design, direction, wardrobe, wig-making, management and administration. Our Orchestra performs at the Sydney Opera House in the Joan Sutherland Theatre for both Opera Australia and The Australian Ballet. Our Chorus is regarded as one of the world’s finest and our musical theatre productions are highly acclaimed.

We look to the future with a determined vision. We are proud to be building on a history of artistic excellence and continuing to work with some of the world’s leading artists. Both on and off the stage, we are developing the next generation of Australian artists through initiatives such as the Patricia H. Reid Orchestral Fellowship; the George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Scholarship Bequest; and our renewed Young Artist Program, a fully-paid 18-month training program which is redefining the way we discover and nurture emerging artists. Today’s young artists join many former ones regularly performing with our company each season.

Our company is sensitive to and supports the broader ecosystem of the sector. We work together with other Australian opera companies such as Opera Queensland and Victorian Opera. We support many smaller performing arts organisations, and co-produce an innovative program with some of the world’s most renowned opera houses and musical theatre producers. Our programming is supported by our federal and state government partners and our generous donors and sponsors.

Developed in consultation with employees, and in the context of the Australian Government’s National Cultural Policy Revive - A place for every story, a story for every place, our strategy  outlines our goal to nurture and extend our artform, audience and company equally.

As we approach our 70th birthday in 2026, we look forward to captivating audiences with more spectacular performances and opening opera up to newcomers to experience the joy of extraordinary stories shared through music and song.

A little history

Australia’s national opera company was born when a band of idealists — butchers, pharmacists, newsagents — gave up their day jobs to celebrate the 1956 Mozart bicentenary with a season of four of his operas. 

Nine years later, theatrical entrepreneur JC Williamson invited the company’s chorus, staff and some of its best singers to perform alongside Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. Suddenly, everyone around the world knew about this little opera company. In 1967, the NSW state government offered a grant towards the formation of a permanent state company. 

The Sydney Opera House opened in 1973 with Prokofiev’s War and Peace, becoming the permanent Sydney performance home for our company. Three years later, Joan Sutherland gave her famous interpretation of the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1982, she performed as Violetta in La Traviata at the inaugural Opera in the Domain.  

Richard Meale's 1986 Voss, based on Nobel winner Patrick White's novel and with libretto by David Malouf, united some of the biggest names in local arts to stage a milestone of Australian-made opera. Baz Luhrmann’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream subsequently became the first Australian opera production to be performed internationally, at 1994’s Edinburgh Festival. Two years later, the company, then known as the Australian Opera, merged with the Victoria State Opera to form Opera Australia, under the artistic directorship of Moffatt Oxenbould.

In 2012, we launched Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour under the artistic directorship of Lyndon Terracini, with a spectacular production of La Traviata. The event quickly became an annual highlight of Sydney’s cultural calendar. Hundreds of thousands of people from Australia and abroad have seen a Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour performance, which have included Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Aida, Turandot, West Side Story, La Bohème and the first ever major outdoor production of The Phantom of the Opera. 

Musicals have also formed an important part of our annual program over the last decade, with annual seasons in Sydney and Melbourne. Highlights have included Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific (2012), My Fair Lady (2016) directed by Dame Julie Andrews, and a sold-out season of The Phantom of the Opera (2022), which was the fastest selling production ever at the Sydney Opera House. 

In 2013, we performed our first Ring Cycle, directed by Neil Armfield and acclaimed by local and international critics. Over the last decade, we have created a series of new productions in partnership with leading international opera companies including, most recently, The Tales of Hoffmann, a co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Opera National de Lyon and Fondazione Teatro La Fenice di Venezia. In 2023, we premiered our second production of the Ring Cycle, the first ever performed in Brisbane, directed by Chen-Shi Zheng. This staging used cutting edge digital technology and was the first “fully-digital” Ring Cycle presented anywhere in the world.

Over the course of our history, we have worked with and supported some of the world’s leading artists: we’ve presented career milestone performances by singers including Dame Joan Sutherland, Jonas Kaufmann, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Nicole Car and Jessica Pratt. Our orchestra has been conducted by maestros including Sir Richard Bonynge, Carlo Felice Cillario and Sir Charles Mackerras. Designs have been created by artists such as Sidney Nolan and Michael Yeargan, and productions staged by theatre greats including Moffatt Oxenbould, Elijah Moshinsky, Graeme Murphy, Barrie Kosky, Baz Lurhmann, Gale Edwards, John Bell, Julie Taymor, Sir David McVicar, Lindy Hume and Francesca Zambello.