The story of this place
Opened on 25 May 1869 with Mozart's Don Giovanni, the Vienna State Opera became the temple of a city obsessed with music. Its architects met tragedy: van der Nüll took his own life amid public ridicule of the design, and Sicardsburg died of a stroke weeks later, neither living to see the triumph. Gustav Mahler directed here from 1897 to 1907. On 12 March 1945 an Allied bomb gutted the building; it was lovingly rebuilt and reopened in 1955 alongside Austria's regained independence, again with the city's finest voices under its restored ceiling.