The State Opera
The opera house on the Ringstrasse opened on 25 May 1869 with Mozart's Don Giovanni. It was hit by bombs on 12 March 1945 and burned out; only the front, the main staircase and the foyer behind them are original. It reopened on 5 November 1955 with Beethoven's Fidelio, a few months after the occupying powers had left, and the reopening is remembered in Austria as a national occasion.
The company works on the repertory system: a large number of productions are kept in stock and the programme changes from night to night. The season runs from September to June, and the house is closed in July and August.
The opera's own ticket rules are these. Seats go on sale for the month in progress and the two that follow. There are 435 standing places, sold only on the day of the performance, from ten in the morning. Every seat has a screen giving the text in up to eight languages, English always among them.
Once a year the stalls are floored over for the Opera Ball, held on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday.
The Philharmonic and the Musikverein
The Vienna Philharmonic was founded in 1842 and is unusual in two respects: its players are drawn from the orchestra of the State Opera, and it governs itself, with no permanent chief conductor.
Its home is the Musikverein, the concert building designed by Theophil Hansen and opened in 1870. The main hall, known as the Golden Hall, is a long rectangular room regarded as one of the finest for orchestral sound anywhere.
The New Year's Concert, of music by the Strauss family and their contemporaries, is given there on the morning of 1 January and broadcast around the world. The same programme is played at a preview on 30 December and on New Year's Eve. The orchestra states that the only way to obtain tickets for any of the three is its online draw: applications are taken from 1 to 28 February for the concerts at the end of the same year, applying early in the month gives no advantage, and the results are sent by e-mail in March. No more than two tickets may be requested for the concert on 1 January. Details are on the orchestra's own site.
Each summer the orchestra gives a free open-air concert in the park at Schönbrunn.
The other houses
- The Konzerthaus, opened in 1913, has several halls and a wider programme than the Musikverein, taking in jazz, early music and new music. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1900, plays in both.
- The Volksoper, opened in 1898, is the house for operetta, and also gives opera, musicals and ballet.
- The Theater an der Wien was opened in 1801 by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of The Magic Flute. Beethoven lived in the building for a time, and Fidelio was first performed there in 1805. It is run as an opera house, and reopened in the autumn of 2024 after renovation.
The Vienna Boys' Choir
The choir traces its history to 1498, when Emperor Maximilian established the court musicians in Vienna. Its original duty continues: with members of the State Opera's orchestra and men's chorus it forms the Hofmusikkapelle, which sings High Mass in the Hofburg Chapel on Sundays at 9.15, from mid-September to the end of June, and on Christmas Day. Seats must be booked. Vienna's tourist board states that since the autumn of 2026 the boys have alternated at these services with the Vienna Girls' Choir.
The choir gives its own concerts in a hall built for it in the Augarten, opened in 2012.
Where the composers lived
- Mozart lived from 1784 to 1787 at Domgasse 5, behind the cathedral, where he wrote The Marriage of Figaro. It is the only one of his Vienna apartments to survive, and is a museum. He was buried in 1791 in an unmarked grave in St Marx Cemetery; the precise spot is not known.
- Beethoven moved house dozens of times. The museum devoted to him is at Probusgasse 6 in Heiligenstadt, then a village outside the city, where in 1802 he wrote the unsent letter to his brothers about his deafness.
- Haydn's last house, in the sixth district, and the houses in which Schubert was born and died are also open.
- Johann Strauss the younger wrote The Blue Danube in 1867 in an apartment at Praterstrasse 54, which is a museum. His gilded statue in the Stadtpark, unveiled in 1921, is among the most photographed objects in the city.
Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and the Strausses lie in a group of honorary graves in the Central Cemetery, in the eleventh district, with a memorial to Mozart among them.
Concerts sold in the street
Around the State Opera and the cathedral, sellers in eighteenth-century costume offer tickets for concerts of Mozart and Strauss. These are given by orchestras assembled for the purpose, in rented halls and palaces, for visitors. They are not performances by the Vienna Philharmonic, the State Opera or the Vienna Boys' Choir, whatever the building. Tickets for those institutions are sold by the institutions themselves.
Balls, festivals and the open air
The ball season occupies January and February, with several hundred balls held by professions, trades and associations in the Hofburg, the City Hall and the concert halls. Most are open to anyone who buys a ticket and observes the dress code.
The Wiener Festwochen, a festival of theatre, music and performance, runs for some five weeks in May and June. In July and August, when the opera and concert houses are closed, filmed opera and concert performances are shown free of charge on a large screen in front of the City Hall.