With Giuditta, the Bad Hall Operetta Festival brings an extraordinary work to the stage: Franz Lehár's last operetta combines grand emotions, exotic settings, and timeless melodies to create a musical farewell of rare intensity.

With Giuditta, a long-cherished dream came true: in 1934, his last operetta premiered at the Vienna State Opera—a rare accol fulfilled a long-cherished dream: in 1934, his last operetta premiered at the Vienna State Opera—a rare accolade for a genre that oscillates between opera and entertainment. Lehár himself saw Giuditta as a boundary-pushing work in which operatic drama, symphonic sound, and the emotional directness of operetta merge into a new form.

The plot unfolds in picturesque and symbolically charged locations: from a Spanish port city to the North African desert, a story of love, longing, and the desire for freedom unfolds. At the center is Giuditta, a woman torn between passion and self-assertion, whose fate is marked by big decisions and painful consequences. Lehár depicts this inner conflict with music that is sensual, melancholic, and dramatically powerful in equal measure.

Unforgettable global hits such as "Freunde, das Leben ist lebenswert" (Friends, life is worth living) and "Meine Lippen, die küssen so heiß" (My lips kiss so hot) lend the work its iconic appeal and make it clear why Giuditta still occupies a special place in the operetta repertoire today. In Bad Hall, the work is being staged for the first time in a production by artistic director Thomas Kerbl, making it an ambitious highlight of the Operetta Festival program.

With Giuditta, the Bad Hall Operetta Festival demonstrates that operetta can be much more than light entertainment: it is musical theater full of emotion, exotic atmosphere, and musical grandeur, hovering between dream and reality, love and loss—and it is precisely this that gives it its timeless fascination.
July 4 to August 1, 2026