8 Best Performing Arts Venues in Vienna, Austria

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 most Sunday mornings at 9:15 am in the Hofburgkapelle. Tickets for all their concerts (including mass at the Hofburgkapelle) must be bought through the individual venues. Purchase early. Tickets without a view of the choir start at €12; going up to €53 with a view.  You can also purchase tickets at the Hofburgkapelle box office (open Friday 11–1 and 3–5). They also have concerts at MuTh.

Much of the Imperial Palace is used today for orchestral concerts. The Festsaal, the largest hall of the Hofburg and originally conceived as a throne room, hosts frequent Strauss and Mozart concerts. If dripping opulence is a must, the Zeremoniensaal, considered the most magnificent hall of the palace, is an unparalleled venue for experiencing Vienna's classical soul.

The Konzerthaus is home to three performance halls: the Grosser Konzerthaussaal, Mozartsaal, and Schubertsaal are all esteemed venues for a range of musical genres, including classical, cabaret, pop, and jazz. The lineup has included greats like Mnozil Brass, Dianne Reeves, Goran Bregović, and the Herbert Pixner Projekt.

For nearly 80 years, the theater has been associated with the University of Music and Performing Arts. Here visitors can watch student performances of both opera and dramatic arts.

If the Mozart symphonies and the whirling waltzes of Strauss are your thing, catch a Mozart and Strauss concert at the Wiener Kursalon, a majestic palace-like structure built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style in 1865 and set in Vienna's sylvan Stadtpark. Here, in gold-and-white salons, the Salonorchester Alt Wien performs concerts of the works of "Waltz King" Johann Strauss and famous works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. You'll hear waltzes, polkas, and operetta melodies.