Vienna State Opera

Palace · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

An opera house on Vienna's Ringstrasse, opened in 1869 and rebuilt behind the front the 1945 bombs left standing, staging sixty different works a year.

The Vienna State Opera keeps one of the heaviest schedules in opera: fifty to sixty different works a year, with the programme changing almost nightly. Behind the arcaded balcony over the entrance, the auditorium curves round in a horseshoe of red and gold. It opened on 25 May 1869 with Don Giovanni, the first of the great Ringstrasse buildings to be finished, and its reception was brutal — critics said the low Renaissance-revival block looked like a sunken chest. Vienna repeated the insults for years, and neither architect lived to see the house open: Eduard van der Nüll took his own life, August Sicard von Sicardsburg died ten weeks later. It has run under Mahler, Strauss and Karajan since, broken only when an air raid burned out the auditorium and stage in March 1945 and left the front standing. It reopened in November 1955 with Beethoven's Fidelio. The auditorium that went back in holds 1,709 seats and 567 standing places, so on a full night a quarter of the room is on its feet. Every seat and every standing place has its own subtitle screen, so the words arrive in your own language at eye level.

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.
Some nights the opera plays free on the square — from April to June, in September and over the New Year it is relayed live to a screen on Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz, 180 chairs beneath it.
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.

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.