Vienna · Karlsplatz
Musikverein
The Golden Hall, widely held to be the finest-sounding concert room ever built
The New Year concert broadcast from this room to about fifty million people
The Golden Hall was finished in 1870 by an architect working without acoustic science, using a shoebox shape, a wooden floor over an air cavity and a coffered ceiling suspended from the roof. The result has never been bettered, and every concert hall built since has been measured against it.
It holds about seventeen hundred seated and three hundred standing, which makes it small by modern standards and is part of why it works. The Vienna Philharmonic plays here as its home, and the New Year's Day concert goes out from this room worldwide.
The detail
Good to know
- Opened
- 1870
- Golden Hall
- 1 744 seats, 300 standing
- Resident
- Vienna Philharmonic
- Broadcast
- New Year concert, about 50 million viewers
More in Vienna
Three more rooms in Vienna
MuseumIconVienna · Ringstrasse
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Habsburg collection in a purpose-built palace, with the largest group of Bruegels in the world
Opera houseStanding roomVienna · Ringstrasse
Wiener Staatsoper
Fifty different operas a season and five hundred standing places every night
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Albertina
A Habsburg palace holding a million prints and drawings, including the hare
Concert Halls
Elsewhere: concert halls
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Berliner Philharmonie
The hall that invented vineyard seating and changed concert architecture worldwide
Concert hallStanding roomLondon · South Kensington
Royal Albert Hall
A Victorian rotunda for five thousand, and eight weeks each summer of the world's largest classical festival
Concert hallFree concertsAmsterdam · Museumplein
Royal Concertgebouw
A shoebox hall from 1888 that most conductors put in their top three in the world