The Golden Hall, where the New Year's Concert is broadcast from, and an acoustic that was arrived at largely by accident.
The Musikverein opened in 1870, built by Theophil Hansen for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and its Großer Saal — the Golden Hall — is generally ranked with the Concertgebouw and Boston Symphony Hall among the finest concert rooms in the world.
The acoustic was not calculated. Hansen was an architect, not an acoustician, and the science did not exist in 1870. What he built was a long, high, narrow shoebox with a wooden floor over a cavity, a coffered wooden ceiling suspended below the roof, statues and balconies breaking up the side walls, and no attempt at a raked floor. Every one of those decisions turned out to matter, and the room’s reverberation and the way it scatters sound have been studied ever since by people trying to reproduce it, mostly unsuccessfully.
It seats about 1,700 with room for 300 standing.
The New Year’s Concert
The Vienna Philharmonic’s concert on 1 January is broadcast from this hall to around ninety countries. Tickets are allocated by a ballot held the previous February, and the odds are poor. The same programme is played on 30 December and on New Year’s Eve, and those are also balloted but slightly less impossible.
The orchestra’s own history with the concert is not simple — it was begun in 1939 under the Nazi regime, and the Philharmonic published research into its own conduct in that period in 2013, which is unusual and worth knowing.
Getting in the rest of the year
The Vienna Philharmonic is the resident orchestra but plays a limited subscription series. The hall is in use most nights with visiting orchestras, chamber music and recitals across five halls in the building — the Brahms Hall for chamber music, and three modern halls added underground in 2004.
Standing tickets for the Golden Hall are sold on the day at low prices. As at the Opera, this is the great Vienna bargain.
Beware of the costumed sellers on the streets around Karlsplatz pushing “Mozart concerts” — those are tourist-market performances, often in other venues entirely, and are not the Musikverein’s programme.
Tours
Guided tours in English run on most days and take you into the Golden Hall when it is free. Booked online, about forty-five minutes.
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The Secession Building
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The Spanish Riding School
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