6 Best Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria

Europe's largest contemporary dance festival takes place in venues large and small all over the city between mid-July and mid-August. In 2017, the festival venues were at nearly 100% capacity, with a record-breaking number of visitors; nearly 130,000 people packed into the halls, museums, and theaters to see some of the world's leading companies take the stage. Recent years have brought stars such as Alaine Platel, Jerome Bel, Mathilde Monnier, Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, and Marie Chouinard.

What would La Traviata be like with two soloists and a piano? Or how about a Tosca where you can join in the chorus? Stefan Fleischhacker's Letztes Erfreuliches Operntheater (otherwise known as the Last Enjoyable Opera Theater, or L.E.O. for short) offers marvelously funny and entertaining performances of grand operas that are appropriate for audiences of all ages (and much shorter than their originals). For a small donation, bread and wine are also available.

The city's most important concert halls are in the 1869 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, better known as the Musikverein. This magnificent theater holds six performance spaces, but the one that everyone knows is the venue for the annual New Year's Day Concert—the Goldene Saal. Possibly the world's most beautiful music hall, it was designed by the Danish 19th-century architect Theophil Hansen, a passionate admirer of ancient Greece who festooned it with an army of gilded caryatids. Surprisingly, the smaller Brahms Saal is even more sumptuous—a veritable Greek temple with more caryatids and lots of gilding and green malachite. What Hansen would have made of the four subsidiary halls added in 2004 and set below the main theater will forever remain a mystery, but the avant-garde Gläserne, Hölzerne, Metallene, and Steinerne Säle (Glass, Wooden, Metal, and Stone Halls) make fitting showcases for contemporary music. In addition to being the main venue for the Wiener Philharmoniker and the Wiener Symphoniker, the Musikverein hosts many of the world's finest orchestras.

A play on the words music and theater, MuTh is the concert hall and permanent home of the world-famous Vienna Boys' Choir (Wiener Sängerknaben). Since it opened in 2012, the 400-seat theater has become the official music center inside the Augarten, the oldest Baroque garden in Vienna. Here the legendary Vienna Boys' Choir performs music that ranges from classical to world music to pop. The vast stage has some of the finest acoustics in Vienna and is equipped with an orchestra pit, specially designed seating, and distinctive acoustic panels. The building itself combines a unique mix of Baroque and modern architecture and includes a café, shop, and seminar room where musical education and other performances take place.

The most enchanting place to hear Mozart in Vienna (or anywhere, for that matter) is the exquisite 18th-century Sala Terrena, where Mozart himself played. In this intimate room (it seats a maximum of 80 people), a chamber group in historic costumes offers concerts in a jewel box overrun with Rococo frescoes in the Venetian style. Said to be the oldest concert hall in Vienna, the Sala Terrena is part of the German Monastery, where, in 1781, Mozart lived and worked for his despised employer, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg.

The beloved Vienna Boys' Choir, known here as the Wiener Sängerknaben, isn't just a set of living dolls out of a Walt Disney film (like the 1962 movie Almost Angels); its pedigree is royal, and its professionalism such that the choir regularly appears with the best orchestras in the world. The troupe was founded by Emperor Maximilian I in 1498, but with the demise of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918, it became its own entity and began giving public performances in the 1920s to keep afloat.

From mid-September to late June, the apple-cheeked lads sing mass at 9:15 Sunday mornings in the Hofburgkapelle. Written requests for seats should be made at least six weeks in advance. Tickets are also sold at ticket agencies and at the box office (open Friday 11–1 and 3–5). Expect to pay a top price of €38 for a seat near the nave, and note that only the 10 side-balcony seats allow a view of the choir. On Sunday at 8:45 am, any unclaimed tickets are sold at the entrance. If you miss hearing the choir at a Sunday mass, you may be able to catch it in a more popular program in the Musikverein.