Vienna State Opera

The Vienna State Opera was the first great public building of the Ringstrasse, the boulevard laid out on the line of the old city walls, and it set the tone for everything that followed: a Neo-Renaissance palace of music built entirely of dressed stone. It was designed by August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, built from 1861 to 1869 with the Czech architect and contractor Josef Hlávka, and paid for by Emperor Franz Joseph, who with Empress Elisabeth attended the opening performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni on 25 May 1869. The stone was chosen with unusual care — the famously hard Kaiserstein from Kaisersteinbruch for the richly carved parts and the polished staircases, other quarries for plinths and walls, and marble throughout the interior.

The Viennese were unkind at first. The street in front was raised by a metre after building had begun, so the house seemed to sit in a hollow, and critics called it a "sunken treasure chest" and the architectural equivalent of the military defeat at Königgrätz. Van der Nüll took his own life, Sicardsburg died weeks later, and neither saw the opening. History has reversed the judgement. Under Gustav Mahler, director from 1897 to 1907, the house became a laboratory of modern staging: he brought in spare, Jugendstil-inspired sets in place of historical clutter and began the practice of darkening the auditorium during performances.

On 12 March 1945 an American bombing raid set the building on fire; the auditorium, the stage and some 150,000 costumes were lost. The front part survived — the vestibule, the grand staircase, the tea room and the foyer painted with frescoes by Moritz von Schwind, and these are the rooms that still give a sense of the original. The rest was rebuilt under Erich Boltenstern in a restrained 1950s manner, with much wood for the sake of acoustics, and the house reopened on 5 November 1955, shortly after the State Treaty restored Austria's independence, with Beethoven's Fidelio. Today it is one of the busiest opera houses in the world, staging some 50 to 60 operas in repertory and hundreds of performances a year, often a different work each night. Its orchestra supplies the members of the Vienna Philharmonic, it is the home of the Vienna State Ballet, and each carnival season it hosts the Vienna Opera Ball.

Getting there

The opera stands on the Ring in the centre of Vienna, beside the Kärntner Strasse. Vienna International Airport (VIE) is about 18 km away.