Vienna State Opera

Palace · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna, Austria

The Staatsoper opened on 25 May 1869 with Don Giovanni, the first of the great Ringstrasse buildings to be finished. Its reception was brutal: critics said the low Renaissance-revival block looked like a sunken chest, and Vienna repeated the insults for years. One architect, Eduard van der Nüll, took his own life; the other, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, died ten weeks after him. Neither saw it open. The house has been running more or less continuously ever since, under Mahler, Strauss, Karajan and the rest. Fire from an air raid destroyed the auditorium and stage on 12 March 1945, leaving the front of the building standing. It reopened in November 1955, the year Austria regained its independence, with Beethoven's Fidelio, an opera that ends with prisoners released from a dungeon into daylight. Behind the arcaded balcony over the entrance, the auditorium curves round in a horseshoe of red and gold. The house also keeps one of the heaviest schedules in opera: fifty to sixty different works a year, with the programme changing almost nightly. Standing places go on sale eighty minutes before curtain, and people mark their spot on the rail with a scarf.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The safety curtain is an artwork, and a different one each season — since 1998 a commissioned work has hung on the iron curtain, in view before the performance and through the intervals.
A scarf on the rail is a claim — standing-room regulars traditionally tie a scarf to the brass rail to mark a place, and the convention is generally respected.
The foyer is the part that came through 1945 — Moritz von Schwind's frescoes are in the surviving front rooms, so the oldest fabric in the building is the bit most people walk past.
One night a year it is not an opera house — on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday the seats come out of the stalls and a floor is laid level with the stage for the Opera Ball, built almost overnight.

Things to do

1
Queue for a standing place
The line forms at a side entrance well before the doors, and it is mostly students and regulars. The view from the rail is straight down onto the stage, and you can leave at any interval without having given up much for it. This is how the city's own audience has always got in.
2
Take the tour if you cannot get in at night
The guided walk goes through the surviving nineteenth-century foyers, the tea salon and out into the auditorium itself. It takes about forty minutes and it is usually the easiest way to see the red and gold horseshoe with the lights up rather than down.