About This Location
This is a mobile audio guide for your walk through Vienna. The map in the app helps with navigation, and the audio plays automatically when you reach each stop by GPS. The tour begins here at one of the city’s best-known landmarks. Now look up at the building in front of you. The Vienna State Opera stands on the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard created after the old city walls came down. This was one of the first major public buildings planned for that new Vienna. From the front, much of what you see is the preserved historic facade from 1869, with its Renaissance style arches, open loggia, bronze figures, and the winged horses above the main facade. The opera house was designed by August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll after an architectural competition. Building work stretched into the 1860s, and the house finally opened on May 25, 1869, with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sung in German. The story has a tragic side - both architects died before they could see the finished building become part of Vienna’s daily life. This was first the Court Opera of the Habsburg world, and later became the Vienna State Opera. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Gustav Mahler helped reshape the artistic life of the house. The building then passed through some of the darkest years in Austrian history: after 1938, Jewish artists and many other employees were driven out. In 1945, bombing left only parts of the original building intact, including the main facade, the grand staircase, and the Schwindfoyer. When the opera reopened on November 5, 1955, Karl Böhm conducted Beethoven’s Fidelio - a performance seen as a symbol of a new beginning for postwar Austria. Today this is still one of the great music stages of Europe, with opera and ballet performances across most of the season. Once a year, it changes character completely for the Vienna Opera Ball, when the famous house turns into a grand ballroom. Standing here, you are also right in the heart of central Vienna - with the Ringstrasse flowing past, the arcades along Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz beside the building, and the city’s museum and shopping quarter just a short walk away.