Musikverein Wien

Theophil Hansen designed it in a Greek Revival manner and it opened in 1870 as the house of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Viennese music society founded in 1812. The Großer Musikvereinssaal — the Golden Hall — is a plain rectangle of a room whose gilded caryatids, coffered ceiling and extravagant height produce the long, warm reverberation for which it is prized; the Brahms-Saal beside it takes chamber music and song. Brahms directed the society's concerts in the 1870s and left it his manuscripts, and the building has been the fixed point of Viennese concert life ever since, its interior known far beyond Austria through the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert.