Vienna State OperaTiers of boxes curve round, the lights rise

One building split in two

Ringstrasse, Vienna, Austria — Opera house on the Ringstrasse.

First, take in that curve.

The auditorium's tiers of boxes stack one over another, red seat-backs following the curve, the gold at the box edges layering upward. Looking up from the stalls, the balcony feels steeper than in photos, the lamps circling the ceiling. Empty, there is no music; footsteps fall muffled on the carpet, and you hear the scale of the house itself.

The string of rooms at the front is held tight, the vaults low, painting and lamps close together; push through a door and the auditorium suddenly opens, the height and the arc both take a breath. There is no sign explaining this; the floor changes underfoot and you notice it yourself. After the walk, what stays is how the building was put back together.

25 May 1869

The opening night staged Mozart's Don Giovanni. Work began in 1861 and finished in 1869, in the Neo-Renaissance style, to designs by August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, built by Josef Hlávka. It stands on the Ringstrasse, and Wikipedia notes it as the first major building on that road, before the rest of the street slowly filled in.

It opened as the Court Opera House, with Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth at the premiere. Only after the empire ended and the republic formed did the name change to the one used today. The name changed, but the building is the same; the emblem in the foyer and the later plaque do not mean quite the same thing.

The auditorium today has 1,709 seats plus 567 standing places. These figures describe the present; the capacity was altered in the postwar rebuild, and the stalls and balcony structures were both changed, though the shape of the box ring in old photos has survived.

The fire of 1945

Near the end of the war, a bombing on 12 March 1945 set the house alight. The auditorium, the stage and the sets and props for over two hundred productions — some 150,000 costumes — burned. The fire started at the back, and the audience half of the building was left with almost nothing usable.

A wall had been built earlier to seal off the front, and so the foyer, main staircase, vestibule and tea room were saved, along with Moritz von Schwind's murals in the foyer. These spaces still lead on toward the back today; the tile floors and vaults are nineteenth-century, held tighter in scale than the hall behind.

Reopening took ten years. On 5 November 1955, after the Austrian State Treaty was signed, the opera house reopened with Beethoven's Fidelio, conducted by Karl Böhm. The new auditorium then held about 2,276; the stalls seats were reduced and the four balcony tiers restructured to stand without columns.

More than three hundred performances a year

The house runs a repertory system: fifty to sixty operas and ten ballets a year, more than 350 performances in total. Almost every day of the week brings a different work, and one set of scenery must house several productions, so backstage the rhythm is quite unlike what the audience sees. What plays on any given day is down to the current schedule.

In carnival season the auditorium is cleared for the Vienna Opera Ball, the stalls floored over while the boxes still glow tier on tier. The house is a place of performance day to day, but those nights it is used another way, the relation between stalls and stage temporarily remade.

The gallery's row of tall windows is the most pleasant stretch to stroll, light coming from the side as columns divide the space into bays. After the performance, with fewer people, you can hear footsteps on the floor — this stretch is best saved for last.