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 - at the University of Cologne, in the repaired wreckage of the older theatres - until the new opera house on Offenbachplatz was finished in 1957. The architect was Wilhelm Riphahn, a Cologne modernist who would also design the Schauspiel Köln playhouse next door five years later. The building opened on 8 May 1957 with a performance of Weber's Oberon, attended by Konrad Adenauer, then Chancellor of Germany and a former mayor of Cologne. The seating capacity was thirteen hundred; the orchestra pit could hold a hundred musicians. The first world premiere came in June - Wolfgang Fortner's Die Bluthochzeit. The following month, La Scala arrived on tour with Maria Callas in La sonnambula.

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 premiered here on 15 February 1965, a work so demanding it took years for other houses to attempt. Karlheinz Stockhausen's vast Sonntag aus Licht had its premiere on the Cologne stage in April 2011. Wagner's Ring cycle returned again and again; in 2006, music director Markus Stenz conducted the entire four-opera cycle in just two days, then took the production to Shanghai four years later. Earlier in the 20th century, when the company was based at the older Theater am Habsburger Ring, it premiered Erich Korngold's Die tote Stadt in 1920 and Alexander Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg in 1922 - both now considered staples of the modern repertoire.

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 promoter Vera Brandes had begged him not to cancel. Jarrett, hungry and in back pain, walked onto the opera stage just before midnight and started playing. He stayed away from the dead upper registers; he leaned into the percussive bass; he made a virtue of the instrument's limitations. ECM's Manfred Eicher had set up to record. The resulting album sold over four million copies and is still in print. The opera house's role in the recording was incidental - it was just the room available that night - but the building has carried the association ever since.

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 converted factory called the Palladium, a tent on the Rhine known as the Musical-Dom, a turn-of-the-century courthouse, an old exhibition hall in Deutz called the Staatenhaus. The costs more than doubled from the original budget, and the project became one of the German cultural scandals of the 2010s. The latest projected reopening, as of 2026, is sometime in mid-to-late 2026, though Cologners have learned to take such dates with skepticism. The children's opera - founded in 1996 as the first dedicated children's opera in Europe - has been performing from its interim home at the Staatenhaus, and will eventually return to Offenbachplatz when the renovation is finally done.

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 François-Xavier Roth, whose tenure ended in 2024. The Gürzenich Orchestra serves as the opera's pit ensemble - one of those German civic orchestras whose continuous existence stretches back into the 19th century. When the Offenbachplatz house eventually reopens, it will return to a city that has spent more than a decade thinking about what its opera was, and what it should become. The Köln Concert will still be on the wall in spirit. The piano will, presumably, be better.