The opera house was built by order of Prussian king Frederick the Great from 1741 to 1743 according to plans by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff in the Palladian style.

Damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, the former Royal Prussian Opera House was rebuilt from 1951 to 1955 as part of the Forum Fridericianum square.

Though architecturally significant as an early example of the Palladian revival in Germany, the north and west façades are direct copies of Colen Campbell's elevations at Stourhead and Wanstead respectively.

This event marked the beginning of the successful, 250-year co-operation between the Staatsoper and the Staatskapelle Berlin, the state orchestra, whose roots trace back to the 16th century.

The reconstruction of the building was supervised by architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and the Königliches Opernhaus (Royal Opera House) was inaugurated the following autumn by a performance of Meyerbeer's Ein Feldlager in Schlesien.

In the 1920s, Kurt Adler, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Bruno Walter occupied the conductor's post.

The same year, the famous Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin and Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with conductor Ernest Ansermet were guest performers.

Clemens Krauss became a prominent German conductor first at the Berlin State Opera in 1933 and was then appointed as its director in 1935 due to Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber resigning, respectively, their positions in protest over Nazi rule.

[7] The opera house was ruined again in an air raid on 3 February 1945, when it was hit by three bombs that destroyed most of the structure, except the main facade on Unter den Linden.

Baroque Opera in particular was at the center of attention, with Graun's Cleopatra e Cesare, Keiser's Croesus, Florian Leopold Gassmann's L'opera seria and Scarlatti's Griselda.

These works were performed by Belgian conductor René Jacobs together with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the Freiburger Barockorchester on period instruments.

[10] In January 2023, Christian Thielemann stepped in as an emergency substitute conductor for Barenboim in a new company production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.