Hungarian State Opera House Tours

The group forms at the information desk in the entrance hall and works upwards. First the foyer, with its dark marble columns and Bertalan Székely’s nine muses painted into the gilded ceiling coffers. Then the grand staircase, which splits in two and carries Mór Than’s paintings of Apollo and Marsyas overhead.

The auditorium is the third stop and the one people come for: three storeys of boxes in a horseshoe, twenty-four-carat gilding, and Károly Lotz’s Olympus fresco with the two-tonne chandelier hanging out of the middle of it.

The commentary is about the building rather than the music, so you get Ybl, the royal condition that capped its size, the nine-year build and the restoration that finished in 2022. An hour is the right length for it.

The last few minutes of the hour are the mini concert on the landing of the grand staircase, and it is included in every tour, in every language, at every time of day.

The Opera publishes neither its length nor its programme, and accounts of both vary, so book the tour for the building and treat the singing as the part that sends you out happy. It is the one thing that still happens when a rehearsal has taken the auditorium off the route.

What the concert does affect is your timing afterwards. The hour runs to the end, so a 16:30 tour has you back on Andrássy út at about half past five, not at five.

This is the risk you are taking when you book, and it is worth planning around. A rehearsal closes the auditorium to visitors, and the Opera gives no notice of which afternoons those will be.

Two things can happen. Most often the tour runs without the auditorium and the guide takes the group into rooms that are not on the normal route. Occasionally the tour is called off outright and the Opera offers another date. Tours never run during a performance at all.

So take the tour early in your trip rather than on your last afternoon. A slot that falls through then still leaves you a day to rebook, and free cancellation means an early booking costs you nothing if your plans move.

English runs at 13:30, 15:00 and 16:30, on more days than any other language. German, French, Spanish and Italian groups leave in the same three slots, a minute or two apart, which is how the Opera fits several languages through one building. The booking calendar shows the days each language is running once you pick it.

The other languages appear on some days and not others, and a second English group is added to the same slots when one group of thirty is not enough. A performance that day can also take out a slot, which the opening hours page explains.

That staggering is also why the building feels busy. Take the 15:00 slot and you may well be one of several groups working through the same rooms in different languages at once.

Take it if you want to see the inside of the building and have it explained. The foyer, the staircase and the auditorium are the point, and an hour with a guide is the only way to walk through them by day.

Skip it if what you actually want is the music. A cheap seat at a performance puts you in the auditorium for a whole evening, and the Opera sells those itself.

Weigh the rehearsal risk before you commit to a day you cannot move. Losing the auditorium is the difference between a very good hour and a merely interesting one, and it is decided by the company’s schedule rather than yours.

Take 13:30 if you can. It is the first tour of the day, the building is emptiest, and you are less likely to be working past another language group in the opposite direction.

The 16:30 slot is the one to avoid if you want quiet. By then the afternoon’s groups have stacked up, and on a performance day the building is also filling with people arriving for the evening.

A 13:30 tour also leaves the rest of the afternoon free for the walk up Andrássy út, which is the natural thing to do next.

Pick the language first in the booking calendar, then the date. The calendar redraws, because German, French, Spanish and Italian run on fewer days than English.

If the day you want has no group in your language, take the English tour rather than moving your plans. The building is the subject, and there is plenty to look at while you listen.

Greek tours are arranged through the Opera’s own tour office.

The booking form takes at most fifteen people in one go, so a party of twenty is two bookings on the same slot. Make the second booking straight after the first, while you can still see places on that time.

Groups are capped at thirty, so a large party may end up split between two guides in the same slot. Everyone still gets the same route and the same concert.