Vienna in Three-Quarter Time: Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and the City of Music

From the stage of Fidelio to the golden Waltz King: the opera house, the Eroica palace, the room where Mozart died, the Golden Hall of the New Year's Concert and the composers of the Stadtpark

Vienna · 10 stops · 23 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. Theater an der Wien & the Papageno Gate

    Linke Wienzeile 6, 1060 Wien, Austria

    Walk round the side of the Theater an der Wien to its old stage door and find, above it, a man in a costume of feathers surrounded by three small boys. This is the Papageno Gate, and the feathered man is Emanuel Schikaneder dressed as Papageno, the bird catcher from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

    Schikaneder was an actor, singer, impresario and the man who wrote the words of The Magic Flute. In 1791 the opera premiered in his modest suburban theatre a short walk from here, with Schikaneder himself singing Papageno, and its long success helped him build this much grander house, which opened in 1801. He put himself, in feathers, over the door. Not a modest man.

    For a while Beethoven was composer in residence, and around 1803 he even lived in the building. His only opera, Fidelio, was first performed here on 20 November 1805... one week after Napoleon's army had marched into Vienna. Much of the Viennese nobility had fled, the hall was full of French officers who did not follow the German words, and the opera flopped. Beethoven revised it twice before it became the freedom hymn we know.

    Three years later, on 22 December 1808, he hired the theatre for a monster concert: the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the public premiere of the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Choral Fantasy and more, about four hours of music in a freezing hall. The orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the Choral Fantasy fell apart and had to be started again. Some of the most famous music ever written was born in chaos.

    The same stage later launched Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus in 1874 and Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow in 1905, so one building holds the birth of Beethoven's great opera of liberty and of Viennese operetta at its most champagne-soaked. Now walk north-east along the Friedrichstrasse, past the white Secession with its dome of golden leaves, and on towards the Ring, where the great rear of the State Opera rises above the traffic.

  2. 2. Vienna State Opera

    Opernring 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

    Stand across the Ring from the Vienna State Opera and let your eyes rest on the open loggia above the entrance, five arches painted with scenes from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Every evening this facade fills with people in everything from gowns to jeans, and the standing-room queue snakes along the side.

    The house opened on 25 May 1869 with Mozart's Don Giovanni, the first great public building of the Ringstrasse. Its architects, August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, never saw that night. Because the street level was raised after work began, the Viennese mocked the building as a sunken box, and even the emperor let slip a critical remark. Van der Nüll took his own life in 1868, and Sicardsburg died a few weeks later.

    The story goes that Franz Joseph was so shaken that for the rest of his life he commented on almost everything with one safe sentence: it was very nice, it pleased me very much. True or not, every Viennese knows the line.

    Gustav Mahler ran the house from 1897 to 1907, darkened the auditorium during performances, shut the doors on latecomers and fought the paid applauders of the claque. The orchestra in the pit is the same body of musicians that, in its own concerts, is the Vienna Philharmonic. On 12 March 1945 American bombs set the opera ablaze, and it only reopened on 5 November 1955 with Beethoven's Fidelio, a few months after the treaty that restored Austria's independence.

    Before you move on, glance behind the opera to the Hotel Sacher. On that spot stood the old Kärntnertor Theatre, where on 7 May 1824 Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was first performed. Completely deaf, he stood on stage beside the conductor, and the story goes that a young singer turned him around so that he could see the applause he could not hear. Now walk past the Albertina to a small square with a baroque palace.

  3. 3. Palais Lobkowitz & the Eroica Hall

    Lobkowitzplatz 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

    On the little Lobkowitzplatz stands a palace with a grand portal and a tall, pale facade, one of the first great baroque palaces built in Vienna after the Ottoman siege of 1683. Today it houses the Theatre Museum; two centuries ago it belonged to a prince who loved music more than his money.

    Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz kept his own orchestra and was one of Beethoven's most generous patrons. In 1804 Beethoven's Third Symphony was first played here, in private, in the palace's great hall, which is now called the Eroica Hall. Imagine the prince's musicians facing a symphony far longer and wilder than anything Haydn or Mozart had written, with the composer himself in the room.

    The symphony had been meant for Napoleon. When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had declared himself emperor, the story goes, he flew into a rage and tore up the title page. What certainly survives is a copy of the score on which the words about Bonaparte are scratched out so hard that the pen went through the paper. The printed symphony carried a dedication to Prince Lobkowitz instead, and a new title, Eroica, to celebrate the memory of a great man.

    In 1809, when a rival court in Germany tried to lure Beethoven away, Lobkowitz joined Archduke Rudolph and Prince Kinsky in promising him a yearly income for life on one condition: that he stay in Vienna. It was a rare thing, aristocrats paying a composer simply to compose. War and inflation soon ate into the money, and the prince's passion for music helped push him into financial ruin.

    Inside the Theatre Museum you can see stage models, costumes and the Eroica Hall itself, painted ceiling and all, a room where you can almost hear those first stunned chords. Now cross Kärntner Strasse, the busy shopping street, and find the Rauhensteingasse a few steps to the east, a side street with a sad secret.

  4. 4. Rauhensteingasse: Site of Mozart's Death

    Rauhensteingasse 8, 1010 Wien, Austria

    Rauhensteingasse is an ordinary side street of shop entrances and office windows, and the building at the corner is a modern department store. Nothing here looks like a shrine. Yet on this spot stood the house where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, shortly before one in the morning on 5 December 1791, at the age of 35.

    Mozart moved here with his wife Constanze and their family in 1790, into an apartment in a house known as the Small Imperial House. It was a respectable address, not a garret. The image of Mozart as a starving pauper is largely a later legend; he earned well, spent faster and borrowed from friends, but in his last year he was working at astonishing speed and his prospects were improving.

    Look at that last year. In a few months he wrote The Magic Flute, which premiered at Schikaneder's theatre on 30 September, the opera La clemenza di Tito for a coronation in Prague, and the Clarinet Concerto. And he began a Requiem, commissioned anonymously through a messenger. The patron turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg, who planned to present it as his own work in memory of his young wife.

    In November Mozart fell ill, swollen and feverish, and took to his bed in the apartment that stood here. The story goes that on his last afternoon friends sang through parts of the unfinished Requiem beside him. The cause of death is still debated; the tale that his rival Antonio Salieri poisoned him is a legend, spread long after, and made famous by the film Amadeus. He was buried in a simple grave in St. Marx cemetery, and the exact spot is unknown.

    His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the Requiem so that Constanze could deliver it and be paid. The house itself was demolished in the nineteenth century, and today only a plaque marks the place. Now walk south-east through the narrow streets to the Seilerstätte, where a palace is full of sound.

  5. 5. Haus der Musik & the Birthplace of the Vienna Philharmonic

    Seilerstätte 30, 1010 Wien, Austria

    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.

  6. 6. Musikverein & the Golden Hall

    Musikvereinsplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria

    In front of you stands a building like an ancient temple, warm ochre and red, with columns, statues and tall arched windows. This is the Musikverein, the house of the Society of Friends of Music, and for millions of people who have never been to Vienna its main hall is the most familiar room in the city.

    The Society of Friends of Music was founded in 1812 by music lovers from the middle classes and the nobility. On 6 January 1870 it opened this building by Theophil Hansen, the same Dane who built the parliament, on land given by the emperor. Johannes Brahms directed the society's concerts for three seasons in the 1870s, and its archive guards precious manuscripts by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

    Its heart is the Great Hall, the Golden Hall: a long shoebox of gilded caryatids, crystal chandeliers and a painted ceiling, seating around 1,700 people, plus standing places. Many musicians call its sound the finest of any concert hall on earth. Hansen had no modern acoustic science to work with; the shape of the room, the wooden floor and the hollow spaces beneath it are usually given the credit. In 2004 four new smaller halls opened, dug out beneath the building, so that the old house could grow without changing a stone above ground.

    Every 1 January the Vienna Philharmonic plays its New Year's Concert here, waltzes and polkas of the Strauss family broadcast around the world. Its origins are less cheerful: the first such concert was given on 31 December 1939, under the Nazi regime, and it served the regime's propaganda. Today the orchestra tells that history openly.

    The encores are fixed by tradition: the Blue Danube, and then the Radetzky March, with the whole hall clapping along and the conductor turning round to conduct the audience. Now walk east along the Lothringerstrasse to the other great concert house of Vienna, built forty-three years later.

  7. 7. Konzerthaus

    Lothringerstraße 20, 1030 Wien, Austria

    Here on the Lothringerstrasse stands the Konzerthaus, a long, light building with tall windows and a touch of Art Nouveau in its ornament. Where the Musikverein feels like a temple, this one is more like a well-designed machine for music: not one main hall but several, side by side.

    It opened on 19 October 1913, and the aged Emperor Franz Joseph came to the opening. Richard Strauss wrote a Festive Prelude for the occasion, for a huge orchestra and organ. The emperor was 83; within three years he was dead, and five years later his empire had gone too. The architects were Fellner and Helmer, the theatre specialists who built playhouses all over Central Europe, working here with Ludwig Baumann, the man who also designed the War Ministry on the Ring.

    The Konzerthaus was meant to be modern and open. Its Great Hall seats more than 1,800, and beside it the Mozart Hall and the Schubert Hall serve chamber music, so several concerts can run on the same evening. From the start its programmes reached beyond the classical canon, and today you may find jazz, world music and contemporary premieres here as easily as a Beethoven cycle.

    It shares its city block with the Vienna Ice Skating Club, whose open-air rink spreads out next door every winter. So on a cold January night you can step out of a Schubert quartet and hear skates scraping and pop music drifting across the ice... two kinds of Viennese happiness, a wall apart.

    The Viennese love to argue about the two houses. The Musikverein is the elder, the golden, the traditional; the Konzerthaus is the younger, a little more adventurous. Most music lovers quietly keep a subscription to both. Now walk round the corner to the north, to a small square where Beethoven himself sits in bronze.

  8. 8. Beethoven Monument on Beethovenplatz

    Beethovenplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

    On little Beethovenplatz, in front of an old grammar school, the composer sits in bronze on a rock, wrapped in a coat, frowning into the distance. Around his pedestal crowd other figures: on one side Prometheus in chains, on the other a Victory holding out a wreath, and a cluster of small children.

    The monument is by Caspar von Zumbusch, the same sculptor who made Maria Theresa on the Ring, and it was unveiled in 1880. Count the children: there are nine, and they are said to stand for Beethoven's nine symphonies. Prometheus, who stole fire for humanity and was punished for it, stands for the suffering genius; Victory for his triumph over that suffering.

    Beethoven arrived in Vienna from Bonn in 1792, aged 21, to take lessons from Joseph Haydn, and a friend wrote in his album that he would receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn's hands. He stayed for the rest of his life, 35 years, first as a dazzling virtuoso pianist, then as a composer, then as a living legend, changing apartments again and again. Haydn found him gifted but difficult, and the young man quietly took extra lessons from other teachers behind his famous master's back.

    His hearing began to fail before he was thirty. In 1802, in the village of Heiligenstadt, then outside Vienna, he wrote a letter to his brothers, never sent, confessing that he had thought of ending his life and that only his art held him back. Most of the music that made him immortal was written after that letter, by a man who heard less and less of it.

    He died on 26 March 1827, during a thunderstorm, and his funeral drew a crowd estimated in the thousands; a young composer named Franz Schubert was among the torchbearers. Now walk a few steps north-east into the Stadtpark, where a golden violinist is waiting.

  9. 9. Kursalon & the Golden Johann Strauss Monument

    Johannesgasse 33, 1010 Wien, Austria

    Under a white marble arch in the Stadtpark stands Johann Strauss the son, gilded from head to toe, violin tucked under his chin, bow raised as if the next waltz were about to begin. He must be one of the most photographed statues in Vienna, and behind him, across the lawns, rises the cream-coloured Kursalon with its terraces.

    The Stadtpark opened in 1862 on part of the old glacis, the first public park laid out by the city itself. The Kursalon followed a few years later as a spa hall, where people came to drink mineral water for their health... and since water alone is dull, they soon wanted music with it. In 1868 Johann Strauss gave his first concert here, and the Strauss family orchestra became a fixture of the place.

    By then he was already the Waltz King. Born in 1825, he had defied his father, Johann Strauss the elder, himself a famous waltz composer, who did not want his son to become a musician and a rival. In 1867 he wrote On the Beautiful Blue Danube, first as a piece for men's choir with rather silly words; only as an orchestral waltz did it conquer the world. Today Austrians hear it at midnight on New Year's Eve, as a kind of second anthem.

    The monument, by Edmund Hellmer, was unveiled in 1921, after the First World War had delayed it for years, and the dancing figures on the arch rise around him like a swirl of music. The gold has divided the Viennese since it appeared: kitsch to some, the perfect picture of the Strauss sound to others.

    Even the serious composers loved him. When Strauss's stepdaughter asked Johannes Brahms to sign her fan, he wrote the first bars of the Blue Danube and added: unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms. Now stroll north through the park, past the pond, to a quieter monument for a composer who never knew such fame.

  10. 10. Schubert Monument & the Composers of the Stadtpark

    Stadtpark, Parkring, 1010 Wien, Austria

    Near the Parkring edge of the Stadtpark, in white marble on a tall pedestal, sits Franz Schubert, a book in his hand, his head slightly raised as if he were listening to a melody nobody else can hear yet. Students eat their lunch on the benches around him, and the ducks from the pond wander past.

    The monument was unveiled in 1872, paid for by the Vienna Men's Choral Society and carved by Carl Kundmann, the same sculptor who made the Athena in front of the parliament. Unlike Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven or Brahms, who came here from elsewhere, Schubert was a born Viennese, from a schoolmaster's family in the suburb of Himmelpfortgrund, today part of Alsergrund, in 1797.

    His life was short and mostly poor. He wrote more than six hundred songs, symphonies including the famous Unfinished, chamber music and piano works, much of it performed only among friends at evenings that became known as Schubertiades. He never held a permanent post, and only a fraction of his music was published while he lived. Yet at about eighteen he had already written his setting of Goethe's Erlking, a song that still makes singers and listeners hold their breath.

    He worshipped Beethoven, lived in the same city for three decades and, by most accounts, hardly dared to speak to him. He carried a torch at Beethoven's funeral in March 1827. Twenty months later, in November 1828, Schubert died at 31, and at his own wish he was buried near Beethoven in the Währing cemetery. In 1888 both were moved to graves of honour, side by side, in the Central Cemetery.

    Wander the paths and you will meet more of the city's musical family: Anton Bruckner, the organist from Upper Austria who became a great symphonist in Vienna, and Franz Lehár, the king of operetta, among others. Vienna does not only remember its composers; it keeps them in its parks like old friends. Here, among them, your musical walk comes to its final chord.