Haus der Musik & the Birthplace of the Vienna Philharmonic
Why is it significant?
On the Seilerstätte, a quiet street that once ran along the inside of the city walls, stands a sober classical palace with banners announcing the Haus der Musik, the House of Music.
Key Facts
| Place | Haus der Musik & the Birthplace of the Vienna Philharmonic |
|---|---|
| Address | Seilerstätte 30, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20380, 16.37320 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna in Three-Quarter Time: Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and the City of Music |
| Generated | Generated |
On the Seilerstätte, a quiet street that once ran along the inside of the city walls, stands a sober classical palace with banners announcing the Haus der Musik, the House of Music. Somewhere inside, a visitor is probably waving a baton at a virtual orchestra... and if the tempo is bad enough, the musicians on screen stop and complain.
This was a palace of Archduke Charles, the general who handed Napoleon his first major defeat at Aspern in 1809. For music lovers, though, another resident matters more. The composer and conductor Otto Nicolai lived here, and in 1842 he founded the Vienna Philharmonic, which gave its first concert on 28 March that year, played by the musicians of the court opera orchestra.
The idea was radical: the musicians would organise their own concerts, choose their own conductors and share the income. It still works that way. The orchestra is a self-governing association, and since 1933 it has had no permanent chief conductor, only invited guests. Even today a musician must first win a place in the State Opera orchestra and play there for years before being allowed to join the Philharmonic. Nicolai himself left for Berlin, wrote the comic opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, and died there in 1849, aged only 38, two months after its premiere.
The orchestra's history has hard chapters too. After 1938 its Jewish members were expelled, and several of them were murdered, while many of their colleagues joined the Nazi party. Only in the twenty-first century did the Philharmonic open its archives to independent historians and publish the story. And it admitted its first woman as a full member only in 1997, the harpist Anna Lelkes.
Upstairs, the museum turns sound into a playground, from the physics of hearing to rooms for the great composers of the city, and the orchestra's own small museum keeps Nicolai's memory. Now head south, cross the Ring, and look for a temple-like building in warm ochre and red behind the Hotel Imperial.