Musikverein

Few rooms on earth are as closely tied to the sound of an orchestra as the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. Richly gilded, it is known simply as the Golden Hall, and since the building opened in 1870 it has been the home stage of the Vienna Philharmonic. Each January the orchestra's New Year's Concert is broadcast from here, which has made the room familiar to people who have never set foot in Austria.

The building belongs to the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, which received the plot from Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1863, when the old city walls were being cleared for the Ringstrasse. The Danish-born architect Theophil Hansen gave the society a Neoclassical design modelled on an ancient Greek temple, with one large concert hall and a smaller room for chamber music; it was inaugurated on 6 January 1870. Among the principal benefactors was the industrialist Nikolaus Dumba, whose name survives on a small street nearby. The Golden Hall measures about 49 metres by 19 metres and rises some 18 metres, seating 1,744 listeners with space for about 300 more standing. Hansen worked without any science of acoustics to guide him, yet the narrow shoebox shape, the thick plastered walls and the profusion of reflecting and scattering surfaces produce a warm, clear and enveloping sound that places the hall among the most admired in the world. Anton Bruckner gave the first organ recital here in 1872; the present organ was built by the Austrian firm Rieger in 1907 and rebuilt in 2011. The notorious 'Skandalkonzert' of 1913, when a programme of modern music ended in uproar, also took place in this room.

The second-largest space, renamed the Brahms Hall in 1937, is a smaller, richly decorated room prized by chamber ensembles and song recitalists. In the early 2000s the architects Wilhelm Holzbauer and Dieter Irresberger added four new halls beneath the Golden Hall, finished in 2004 and named after their dominant materials: glass, metal, wood and stone.

Vienna itself, capital of Austria and for centuries seat of the Habsburgs, is the city of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, and the Musikverein stands at the heart of that tradition, just off the Ringstrasse in the Innere Stadt, behind the Hotel Imperial.

Getting there

The Musikverein is in central Vienna, on Musikvereinsplatz in the Innere Stadt district, about 0.9 km from the city centre and a short walk from the Karlsplatz U-Bahn station. Vienna International Airport (VIE) lies about 18 km away.