She is one of the stars of the Vienna Volksoper, has sung at a Formula 1 race track as well as in the Prater Stadium, and gives solo concerts. Juliette Khalil sings where you least expect her to, while remaining remarkably true to herself. As to be encountered at midnight at the Science Ball.
What happens when you send a soprano to a Formula 1 race in Styria? The loudest thing is no longer the race car; race car driver Lewis Hamilton covers his ears, and the soprano wins over the audience. This is what happened in the summer of 2023, when Juliette Khalil, together with Austropop musician Christopher Seiler and a choir and orchestra, sang a musical fusion of the Austrian and Styrian anthems on the asphalt of the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg. But then the roaring noise of show jets flying overhead mingled with composer Christian Kolonovits’ mix of “Land der Berge” and “Dachsteinlied.” Hamilton stood out with his defensive posture and probably missed Khalil’s voice, which captivated drivers, politicians, hundreds of thousands of people on site, and millions of viewers on their screens. Too bad for him, good for Khalil: the performance in Spielberg was to remain just one of many stages on which she crosses musical boundaries.
Although Khalil was the only one in her childhood environment who could do more with music than just listen to it, her talent was encouraged early on by her family. She also received support from those around her: “My elementary school teacher encouraged me to continue,” Khalil told the press. With her entry into the Vienna State Opera Children’s Choir and her role at the Vienna Chamber Opera, her career aspirations were clear: the girl who loved to play self-determined women wanted to be on stage. “I was nine, and my first performance was the opera ‘La Bohème,’” Khalil said. Later, after graduating from school, she studied MUT at the MUK, the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. MUT is an acronym that stands for musical entertainment theater; training the voice for the stage. Khalil’s bright soprano voice grew out of the rehearsal rooms and into concert halls and opera houses, back to the Vienna State Opera, where she had once started in the children’s choir.
During this time, she also won first prize in the highly renowned Walter Jurmann Singing Competition and received early indications that her voice was capable of much more. This was followed by her debut at the Vienna Volksoper. Since then, she has been a member of the ensemble, has made guest appearances in Germany, Japan, and Luxembourg in recent years, and has built up an impressive repertoire: opera, operetta, and musicals, from Papagena in “The Magic Flute” to Adele in “Die Fledermaus” and Maria in “West Side Story” to Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” On Instagram, where Khalil occasionally gives insights into her private life, she once wrote that she appears in up to 15 productions on stage throughout the year. In 2022 alone, she celebrated six role debuts, including My Fair Lady, her childhood dream.
On the television stage of musical comedian Austrofred, she recently sang about her musical spectrum outside of opera and then announced that she was now at home where she always wanted to be: she didn’t want to commit herself to opera or operetta, but to what she could do and what defined her. So in the summer of 2025, two years after her boisterous performance at the Styrian racetrack, she was back on stage with Christopher Seiler and his bandmate Bernhard Speer. This time, however, it was at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium, also known as Prater Stadium. There, the duo Seiler and Speer celebrated the tenth anniversary of their debut album under the motto “A schware Partie 2025” and invited Khalil as a guest to perform the hits “Ala bin i” and “Ruaf mi ned au” together, this time on a slightly smaller scale, with over 50,000 spectators in attendance.
In comparison, the ballroom of the town hall seems almost intimate at the midnight interlude in 2026.