Budget Management
On September 30, 1791, the curtain rose at Vienna’s Freihaus Theater on an opera in which three trials decide everything. Silence, fire, water. «The Magic Flute» turns 235 this week, and rarely has an anniversary landed so neatly on the calendar. Because Stuttgart has just decided to hold a trial of its own.
On trial is the renovation of Max Littmann’s 1912 opera house, a protected landmark that has needed serious help for years. In 2019 the estimate was about one billion euros. Public broadcaster SWR now expects around two billion, and there is no official figure. The temporary venue, meant to house the company for roughly ten years of construction, is capped at 289 million. Its groundbreaking has slipped from 2026 to 2028; the first performance there is now slated for 2033. Baden-Württemberg’s premier, Cem Özdemir, and Stuttgart’s mayor, Frank Nopper, want «all the facts on the table»: renovation, temporary venue, or a new build.
To put it plainly: the review is right. It’s just a few years late.
A doubling is not an amendment
Some steering committees call a doubled budget an «update.» An update is when the tenor holds a note one bar longer. A doubling is a different opera.
PMI’s standard puts it more soberly: a project exists to deliver value. «Focus on value» is one of its core principles. That makes the business case not a document for opening night, but a promise that has to be kept again at every phase gate. When a load-bearing assumption changes, whether cost, schedule, or benefit, asking «Should we still do it this way?» is not disloyalty. It’s the job. In Stuttgart, the value each euro buys has been cut in half. Skip the review, and the orchestra keeps playing a score whose key changed long ago.
Papageno’s mistake
«The Magic Flute» knows how trials fail. Inside the temple, Tamino and Papageno receive one clear rule: stay silent. Tamino obeys. Papageno starts chatting at the first opportunity, of all people with an old woman who later turns out to be his Papagena. He doesn’t fail because he’s stupid. He fails because he treats the rule as a suggestion.
In Stuttgart, everyone is chatting. The CDU wants planning frozen: «Anyone serious about a review must not create facts on the ground.» The Greens want planning to continue alongside the review so no time is lost. Both positions hold some truth. Both argue about the pace of the review. Almost no one is talking publicly about its rules, and no date for a result has been named.
Rules before the fire
A review whose criteria are set after the verdict is not a review. It’s a wish list set to music. So three things belong in place before the first consultant is hired.
The first question is: what do we measure? Not construction cost alone, but life-cycle cost, the years without a home stage, the landmark, and the season itself. The second question is: by when? The temple does not test forever, and a decision without a deadline is a postponement on letterhead. The third question is: what keeps moving? Work needed in every scenario can continue. Work that presumes one option pauses. That is the way out of the stop-versus-go fight, and it appears in no party platform.
Then there’s something Stuttgart won’t enjoy hearing. Money already spent on planning does not count in the decision. It’s gone, whichever way the choice falls. «We’ve already invested so much» is the sunk cost argument: the most comfortable one in project management, and the most wrong.
Fire and water
Tamino doesn’t pass the final trials alone. Pamina walks with him through fire and water while the flute plays. Mozart and Schikaneder handed us a fine picture of governance: state and city, Greens and CDU, Intendant and building owner go through together. Or not at all.
Stuttgart’s trial can succeed. It needs rules set in advance, a deadline someone actually keeps, and a little more silence than the temple currently hears. Papageno, by the way, got his Papagena in the end anyway. An opera house with two billion on the bill shouldn’t bet on that kind of luck.