Opera in Arabic

Ratiba El-Hefny sung the title role in Cairo in Lehár's The Merry Widow in Arabic in 1961.

[3] On March 6, 2008, at the 8th Al-Ain Classical Music Festival at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, Polish opera director Ryszard Peryt directed Egyptian musicologist Aly Sadek's translation of Mozart's Don Giovanni, as performed by soloists, the choir of the Université Antonine, Baabda, Lebanon, and the Warsaw Philharmonic's Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Zbigniew Graca.

Miramar first opened in Cairo in 2005, with libretto by renowned poet Sayed Hegab after Naguib Mahfouz's novel of the same name.

In July 2009, Daniel Barenboim's Youth Orchestra in Ramallah produced the opera The Sultana of Cadiz (later renamed to Die arabische Prinzessin), based on a pasticcio of music by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga to a new libretto by Paula Fünfeck after an Arabic fairy tale at Ramallah's Cultural Palace.

In April 2010, Reuters reported that China will spend $40 million to build a 1,400-seat opera house in Algiers.