The third opera I saw at the State Opera in Vienna back in 2016 was Don Pasquale, a comic opera by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848). This is an opera I have often seen before, but I never get tired of it — it’s so beautiful and funny. I think men of Read More …
The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is one of the world’s busiest opera houses, with 350 performances per year. When I was there, in the last week of October 2016, they put on five performances of three different operas. I went to all three of these. There were two evenings Read More …
The Volksoper (meaning “People’s Opera”) in Vienna puts on about three hundred performances per year — nearly every evening from September through June — of operas, operettas, musicals and ballets. Like the Komische Oper in Berlin and the Gärtnerplatz opera house in Munich, the Volksoper has a policy of performing most their Read More …
This historic theater got its name from the fact that it was built on the bank of a small river called the Wien — a river that has since been banished underground. For many years the Theater an der Wien presented a mixed bag of operas, operettas, musicals and spoken Read More …
During his ten years in Vienna, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived at a number of different addresses. His apartment at Domgasse 5 is said to be “the largest, most elegant and expensive apartment ever occupied by Mozart and the only one that is still intact today.” He lived here Read More …
This “House of Music” (Haus der Musik) in Vienna describes itself as “an interactive sound museum which provides a new approach to music on a playful as well as scientific level.” It was opened in the year 2000 in a building that was once the palace of Archduke Charles (1771–1847), Read More …
The Musikverein (Music Society) maintains this ornate historic concert hall in the center of Vienna. The one concert I attended here was many years ago, so I have no photos of the inside, but you can easily see what it looks like by watching (for example) the annual televised New Read More …
All you loyal readers of my Kaiserslautern post might recall that one of the operas I saw there was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This was the opera that sparked a remarkably sudden shift in the tastes of German-language opera-goers in 1927, away from the lavish Neo-Romantic extravaganzas of Read More …
The MuseumsQuartier Wien claims to be “one of the largest art and culture complexes in the world.” It opened in 2001 in a group of 18th and 19th century buildings that once served as the Imperial Stables. (Imagine these monumental buildings and courtyards full of horses — hundreds of horses.) Read More …
The Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) is a major art museum that was built starting in 1891 near the Imperial Palace in Vienna to display the extensive art collections of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph and his family. Among many other famous art works, this museum has fourteen paintings by Pieter Bruegel Read More …