Vienna's Golden Hall: A journey of musical triumph and humbling embarrassment unfolds

Daily Maverick

02-06-2025

An unforgettable experience has its embarrassing moment, though it won't detract from the wonder of it all.
Two profoundly memorable things happened to me, at the same time, while on holiday this month. One fulfilled a lifelong dream and left me jubilant and wondrously awed. The other will be recorded as one of the more embarrassing moments of my long and mostly uneventful life.
Both happened in Vienna, famously known as the City of Music because of its rich history as the classical world's cultural centre and home to those composing icons Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss.
As an aside, it is also known as the City of Dreams, home to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who believed dreams helped to access the unconscious mind and who, in 1938, fled Austria before Nazi Germany annexed it and began persecuting Jews.
Another aside: Vienna is also known as the Capital of Europe's Spies, situated so closely as it is to the Iron Curtain of old. A surprising number of spy thrillers of the 20th century take place here, my favourite being John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, in which he used Vienna as a backdrop for his Cold War spy story.
But I want to concentrate on cultural Vienna, a city with fewer people than Soweto, the locus of my amazement and humiliation.
My love of classical music and opera has taken me to many magnificent venues – The Met in New York, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy, among them, each with its own special beauty.
But nothing prepared me for the magnificence of the Golden Hall in Vienna's Musikverein, which is home to the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
It was a drizzly grey day when we, a party of four in the city to celebrate a friend's milestone 70th birthday, arrived at the imposing building. Immediately I noticed that we were hopelessly underdressed — me in sneakers and under a cosy, unflattering puffer jacket covering a bulky sweater and casual slacks.
It was 11am on a Sunday morning, but this 'subscription concert' (where you buy a season ticket and therefore have first pick of seats), inspired Vienna's societal elite to don their finest garb. People dress up for these events, and oh, what a spectacle it was.
Formal fashion
Women glided along in floor-length, mid-length and short evening gowns, some covered in sequins that ignored the daylight etiquette rule (though whose rule that is remains unknown). Furs, high heels, one tiara, gleaming jewels; men in jacket and tie or dress suits with traditional white silk opera scarves… the fashion was formal.
Scent wafting off the concertgoers perfumed the foyer. Traditionally guttural German tripping of tongues sounded unusually melodic and sweet. But none of this — not even the thrill of the dress-up — prepared me for the inside of the Musikverein.
We climbed and climbed flight after steep flight of stairs to get to the boxes lining the edges of this magnificent gilded hall, opened on 6 January 1870 by Emperor Franz Joseph.
And then, breathless but exhilarated, we were in our eyrie beneath a canopy of golden splendour, the ceiling mural adorned with images of Apollo and the nine muses. Columns shaped like ancient female figures — golden caryatids — added to the grandeur of this space that is known for its acoustics and rated as one of the three finest concert halls in the world, along with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and the Boston Symphony Hall.
Remember, we had to contend with what tickets were left over after regular concertgoers had booked their season tickets, so we could hear but only see the orchestra if we craned over seated heads to glimpse the mostly penguin-suited men below.
Dotted in between were women in demure black, mostly on violin or percussion instruments. The introduction of women musicians in the orchestra is a new phenomenon — it was, astonishingly, the sacred preserve of men until 1997. This concert taking place on a cool damp Sunday morning in the City of Dreams was particularly special and highly unusual for Vienna: all the main roles — composer, conductor and piano soloist — were played by women.
Up first was Lithuanian composer and pianist Raminta Šerkšnytė's 2009 composition, Midsummer Song, for which the instrumentation was described as 'string orchestra with optional percussion with one performer: triangle, shaker, rain stick, wind chimes and vibraphone'.
The 50-year-old composer named nature 'with its metaphorical comparison to the archetypical states of the human mind' as her main inspiration, describing her work as a 'pantheistic song, like a long journey to eternal light and to our inner peace of mind'.
It was melodic. I found it moving. I loved it. But they're a hard lot to please, these knowledgeable Vienna music lovers. A woman seated close by muttered: 'I doubt that will ever be played in this hall again!'
Dark-haired and petite with a powerful waving conductor's arm, 38-year-old Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (her credentials include serving as musical director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra), was more warmly received.
Not so much the globally controversial 38-year-old Beijing-born American pianist Yuja Wang, whose skimpy attire fashion sense has been universally criticised. She emerged from the wings in a silver bare-backed bandage dress that barely covered her modesty, finished off with six-inch Louboutin red-soled heels.
Sequined, modest-gowned women in our box bristled. 'She lets down women,' my neighbour whispered. 'Prostitute,' another woman said under her breath, but loudly enough to be heard.
Transfixed
Then Wang began playing that most popular concerto ever written, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor, her fingers expertly moving across the keys, her short black hair flying, her small body swaying, vibrating, moving to the music. We were transfixed as the exposed muscles in her shoulder blades rippled.
My humiliation (and my friend's embarrassment) came at the first lull in the music when, with much enthusiasm and vigour, I began clapping.
My neighbour waved her hands wildly in my face, shouting at me in German. Someone interpreted: She says stop clapping. You DO NOT clap between movements.
The typical concerto is in three movements, or sections: a fast movement in sonata form, a slow and lyrical movement, and then another fast movement.
I now know that the convention is that you do not clap until the end, a red-faced lesson learned in Vienna, in the beautiful Golden Hall. I remained seated and silent during the Sibelius Lemminkäinen Suite that ended the concert.
What is it with women and the arts through the ages? I saw a series of exhibitions across London and Vienna — Dürer, Bruegel, Arcimboldo, Bassano, Edvard Munch, Goya, the impressionists Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso, Cézanne.
Not one single woman artist among them. Did women choose not to paint or sculpt or draw? The art history books tell us it was not encouraged and they were left to expend their creative energy on traditional arts more suited to women — like embroidery.
I must admit that I was surprised by how recent was the admission of women to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. I wonder, too, why these older women concertgoers perpetuate women-hating stereotypes. Calling a young woman a prostitute because of her fashion choice seems a bit archaic in 2025. DM
Charmain Naidoo is a journalist and media strategist.