Vienna, The Staatsoper and the Ringstrasse: Vintage Travel Poster from a 1906 Photograph
VIENNA, in tall red capitals edged in gold, fills the top of the sheet, with a woman’s face crowned by golden hair looking down from the frame. Below, on a cream ribbon, come the words Staatsoper and Ringstrasse. Through an arch of green leaves and pale flowers, the opera house rises in warm sandstone under a summer sky, its arcades and bronze riders catching the light, while a red tram glides along the Ring, a carriage waits by the kerb and ladies in long dresses stroll across the square. At the foot of the frame a scroll reads Austria · 1906. This poster comes from a stereo photograph of the opera published in 1906 by the Keystone View Company and now in the Library of Congress.
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Original photograph: The Magnificent Imperial Opera House of Vienna, Austria, stereograph no. 15600, Keystone View Company, copyright 1906 (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s17131; no known restrictions on publication)
Interpretation: Sapiens Verbum
Subject: The Vienna State Opera, then the Imperial Court Opera, on the Opernring, with trams and street life
Location: Opernring 2, Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria
Medium: Art Nouveau travel-poster interpretation of a public-domain stereo photograph
Lettering: VIENNA · Staatsoper · Ringstrasse · Austria · 1906 · Sapiens Verbum
Series: Vintage Travel Posters from Old Photographs
The poster keeps what the photograph shows: the opera house seen from street level, its long flank on the left, the arcaded loggia of the main facade on the right with a bronze rider on each corner, and a crowd of people crossing the pavement in front. What it changes is everything a black-and-white photograph taken on a cold day could not give. The stone turns honey-coloured, the sky fills with high summer clouds, the fur hats and dark overcoats become light summer dresses, and a red tram and a carriage arrive on the Ring. In the lower corners two small vignettes add a river view with a Gothic spire and a gilded statue on a tall pedestal. The frame is pure Art Nouveau, whiplash stems in green and gold with pale flowers in the corners, a fitting dress for the city where the Secession was founded in 1897.
A palace for opera on the new Ring
The opera house was one of the first great public buildings of the Ringstrasse, the boulevard that Emperor Franz Joseph ordered in 1857 when he decreed that the old city walls and moats should be pulled down (Ringstrasse). The architects were August Sicard von Sicardsburg, who planned the building, and Eduard van der Nüll, who designed the interiors. Neither saw it open. Van der Nüll took his own life, and Sicardsburg died of a stroke soon afterwards. On 25 May 1869 the house opened with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth (Wiener Staatsoper, History).
The opera in 1906: the Mahler years
When this photograph was published, in 1906, the house was still the Imperial and Royal Court Opera, and its director was Gustav Mahler. Mahler ran the opera from 15 October 1897 to 31 December 1907. He swept away careless routine, demanded precision from singers and orchestra, and with the stage designer Alfred Roller, a founder member of the Secession, brought a new kind of stagecraft to the house. The pavement in the photograph, crowded with men in overcoats and women in fur hats, is the one his audiences crossed on their way to the performances that made the decade famous.
Much of the house in the picture did not survive the Second World War. On 12 March 1945 a bombing raid set the opera on fire. Only the main facade, the grand staircase and the Schwind Foyer survived. The house was rebuilt with a new auditorium and reopened on 5 November 1955, with Beethoven’s Fidelio conducted by Karl Böhm, a night broadcast on Austrian television. The facade you see in the poster is one of the parts that came through the war.
The photograph behind it
The source is a stereograph, a pair of almost identical photographs mounted side by side on a card, which jumped into three dimensions when you looked at it through a hand-held viewer, one of the favourite parlour pastimes of the years around 1900. It was published by the Keystone View Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania, as number 15600, The Magnificent Imperial Opera House of Vienna, Austria, and the card carries a copyright date of 1906. The picture was taken on a cold day: in the foreground a woman in a large fur hat walks towards the camera, and behind her men in dark overcoats and bowler hats cross in front of the loggia. The card is in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, which records no known restrictions on publication (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s17131). The poster keeps the angle, the building and the crowd, and adds the summer, the colour and the trams.
Seeing the view today
The opera stands at Opernring 2, on the corner where the Ring meets Kärntner Strasse, the shopping street that leads to St Stephen’s Cathedral. Stand on the Ring side of the square and you have the photograph’s angle: the arcades of the main facade, the long flank of the building and the trams still running in front. The nearest U-Bahn station is Karlsplatz. The house offers guided tours, and the official website lists the times. For the paintings of the city, the Belvedere and the Kunsthistorisches Museum are a short tram ride away along the Ring.
The series continues with Paris, The Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro and Venice, The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute, both made from photochroms of the 1890s, and began with Fene, Paisaje de Maniños, a poster made from a 1932 postcard of the Ría de Ferrol.
Bring Belle Époque Vienna to your wall in the style of a golden-age travel poster. This Art Nouveau poster of the Vienna opera and the Ringstrasse is available as a museum-quality print, canvas or poster, and it can also be licensed for your own project.
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Part of the Vintage Travel Poster series.
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