Vienna
2,000 years
of European history,
in one city
     
 
Vienna
... in English

'

  2020
Interview


"They were jamming classical music. (...) Where do you see that?"


On Beethoven
(and Vienna
)

Billy Joel



On Beethoven

Billy Joel is interviewed about what Beethoven (and Vienna) means to him.

(Recorded as part of the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth)

Top 2020

Concert


John Williams conducts the Vienna Philharmonic with Anne-Sophie Mutter at Vienna's Musikverein


John Williams

Vienna Philharmonic
Anne-Sophie Mutter




The Imperial March from
Star Wars



Theme from
Jurassic Park



Main Theme from
Star Wars



Hedwig's Theme from
Harry Potter


On the 18th and 19th January 2020 the Musikverein in Vienna hosted two concerts with the film composer and 5-time Academy Award winner John Williams conducting the Vienna Philharmonic together with Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Top 2015

Film


Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson don't take the stairs at the Vienna State Opera


Mission: Impossible
Rogue Nation




The Vienna State Opera scene


Two sequences for the 5th film in the series were filmed in Vienna in the summer of 2014. A scene on the U2 underground line. And the scene on the roof of the Vienna State Opera.

Top 1995
Music


"This is for my father"

Billy Joel




Vienna

Billy Joel dedicates a song to his Bavarian-born father who having immigrated to the USA in 1938 returned to Europe after the war, living for 50 years in Vienna.



(Vienna from the 1977 album The Stranger)

Top 1995

Film


(Maybe) the best of the international movies filmed in Vienna


Before Sunrise




 
   
   
Vienna, 1995

"This is what we should do . . . Get off the train with me, here in Vienna, and come check out the town."

Jesse is on a train to Vienna for a flight back to the US. Celine is on her way to Paris. They get talking. The first of three films (so far).

Written by: Richard Linklater & Kim Krizan
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Production:
USA/Austria/Switzerland, 1995
Filmed:
In Vienna

Top 1981
Music


"Haunting notes,
pizzicato strings"

Ultravox




Vienna

Filmed at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna's 11th district and also by St Stephen's Cathedral. And in London's Covent Garden.

(Midge Ure's best photograph:
Flying to Vienna with Paula Yates)

Top 1973
Poetry


"And the deep river ran on"

W.H. Auden




W.H. Auden
Wescoe, near Threlkeld, Cumbria
1928


Bromide print, 1928, John Bicknell Auden
© Estate of John Bicknell Auden


One of the 20th century's major literary figures, W.H. Auden spent much of his later life in Austria.

From 1958-73 Auden summered at his farmhouse in Kirchstetten near Vienna. He died in the Austrian capital on 29th September 1973 and is buried in the cemetery at Kirchstetten.

See W.H. Auden page

Top 1949
Film


One of British cinema's greatest films, filmed in post-war Vienna

The Third Man




Film trailer

Carol Reed directed Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Paul Hörbiger, Hedwig Bleibtreu and Trevor Howard in a Graham Greene screenplay. Music by Anton Karas.

Watch The Third Man every week at the
Burg Kino or do the Third Man Tour.

 
 

Top
 


"I do not mind what
language
an opera is sung in
so long as it is a language
I don't understand."


Edward Appleton
(1892-1965)

(The Nobel-prize-winning
physicist in an Observer
newspaper article from 1955)


Links

Stadt Wien

City of Vienna information


Welcome to Vienna

Tourist information


Shakespeare & Company
Booksellers


Burg Kino

Cinema


Vienna's English Theatre

Theatre


Metropole

Magazine

 

Musical interlude


Englishman
in New York
Sting


Music and
lyrics
Gordon Sumner