One morning in the Golden Hall, broadcast to ninety countries, with seats that cannot simply be bought
The Vienna New Year Concert — the Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker — is performed on the morning of 1 January in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. It was first given in 1939 and has run annually since 1941. The programme is Strauss family and Viennese repertoire, and it is broadcast to around ninety countries.
Seats are not sold in the ordinary sense. They are allocated by ballot, entered a year in advance through the orchestra, and demand exceeds supply by a wide margin. Guaranteed seats on request do not exist in the ordinary way.
What is reachable is the surrounding programme: the rehearsal on 30 December and the preview performance on New Year’s Eve are the same orchestra, the same hall and substantially the same programme, with a fraction of the competition for seats. For most visitors they are the better experience — the room is free of the broadcast and the atmosphere is musical rather than ceremonial.
The repertoire is Strauss family — waltzes, polkas, marches and a quadrille or two — with Viennese contemporaries around it. A different conductor is invited each year and brings a handful of rarities, but the shape holds, and so do the two encores that close every performance: the Blue Danube, which the orchestra begins and the applause interrupts by tradition, and the Radetzky March, clapped through by the hall.
That predictability is the point rather than a limitation. Nobody attends to be surprised. They attend because a room built in 1870 for this music is being used for exactly what it was built for, on the one morning of the year when most of the world is watching.
It is worth saying what the morning is actually like, because the broadcast does not convey it. The concert begins at eleven, the hall is full by half past ten and it ends early enough that the rest of the day is intact. Vienna outside is quiet in the way only a capital on 1 January can be, which makes lunch afterwards one of the better meals of the year to have booked in advance.
Tell us which turn of the year you are planning and we will build Vienna around it
The concert sits inside a fortnight that is the strongest of the Vienna year. The State Opera runs a full programme through the holidays, the Konzerthaus and the Musikverein both have their own calendars, and the carnival season starts immediately afterwards and runs to Ash Wednesday with several hundred balls in it — of which the Opera Ball is only the most famous.
The city is also at its best in that fortnight in a way that has nothing to do with music. The museums are open and half empty by mid-morning, the coffee houses are working normally, and the cold is the dry kind. Two or three days either side of the concert are not padding; they are the reason to come.
On the morning of 1 January each year, in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein.
Not directly. Seats are allocated by ballot entered roughly a year ahead through the Vienna Philharmonic, and demand far exceeds the hall.
The rehearsal on 30 December and the preview performance on 31 December — same orchestra, same hall, substantially the same programme, far fewer applicants.
Strauss family waltzes and polkas with Viennese repertoire around them, and the encores that close it are the same two every year.
A year for the ballot, and several months for Vienna itself over the turn of the year.
The Blue Danube, which the audience interrupts with applause by custom, and the Radetzky March, clapped through by the hall. Both close the concert every year.
Formal, despite the morning start — this is an evening-dress occasion held at eleven o’clock.
A great deal. The State Opera runs through the holidays and the carnival ball season begins immediately after and runs to Ash Wednesday.
