Vienna

The many lives of George Weidenfeld, legendary publisher and ladies’ man

2 September 2023 9:00 am

Born in a poor quarter of Vienna, the refugee took London by storm, married four times, survived financial ruin and died eulogised the world over

Love in the shadow of the Nazi threat

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Florian Illies describes the charged atmosphere of Europe in the early 1930s, as people grew increasingly desperate to celebrate their last chance of freedom

Was it murder?

20 May 2023 9:00 am

In a beautifully told novel, O’Callaghan focuses on the mysterious death of the footballer Matthias Sindelar in 1939 – possibly as a result of defying Hitler

The trouble with Austria's vaccine passport plan

9 November 2021 12:05 am

Are vaccine passports being used in other countries in an attempt to cut Covid infections – or to try and…

Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows

29 May 2021 9:00 am

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…

There’s no better sonic hangover cure: New Year’s Day Concert reviewed

9 January 2021 9:00 am

The best moment in the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Day Concert comes after the end of the advertised programme.…

The forgotten female composer fêted by Mozart and Haydn

12 September 2020 9:00 am

Selina Mills on Maria Theresia von Paradis, the gifted but forgotten 18th-century composer, whose story will finally be told in a new chamber opera

An elegy for Vienna

13 June 2020 9:00 am

Vienna Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false…

A brilliant, unrevivable undertaking: Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt reviewed

15 February 2020 9:00 am

History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna…

‘Children’s Games’,
1560, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Wonderful, overwhelming, once-in-a-lifetime display of Bruegels – get on a plane now

20 October 2018 9:00 am

‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great…

The singing made me seasick: ETO’s Don Giovanni reviewed

26 March 2016 9:00 am

One of these days I will probably see a production of Don Giovanni set in a research station in the…

Hans Asperger at the Children’s Clinic of the University of Vienna Hospital c.1940

Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis — or sell them out?

12 September 2015 9:00 am

Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna

Some good came out of the negotiating chamber this week, but it concerned Iran rather than Greece

18 July 2015 9:00 am

As an occasional lecturer on the abstruse topic of the efficacy of sanctions in conflict resolution, I find myself much…

Pliny the Younger on Fifa

6 June 2015 9:00 am

In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…

Spectator letters: Why not vote like Belgians?

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Bees vs Belgians Sir: To answer Rory Sutherland and Glen Weyl’s question: yes, everyone should vote and no, just because…

Neither London nor New York will be livable in ten years’ time

25 April 2015 9:00 am

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which…

The guilty man: Johann Strauss

Vienna is a crossroads of the world again – but something’s missing

21 March 2015 9:00 am

People get the wrong idea about Vienna and I blame Johann Strauss. His plinky-plonky waltzes have become the soundtrack to…

The Nazi origins of the Vienna Phil’s New Year’s Day concert

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Vienna’s New Year’s Day concert is still tarnished by its Nazi origins, says Norman Lebrecht

‘Before the Mirror’, 1913, by Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele at the Courtauld: a one-note samba of spindly limbs, nipples and pudenda

8 November 2014 9:00 am

One day, as a student — or so the story goes — Egon Schiele called on Gustav Klimt, a celebrated…

Fischer’s is like visiting Vienna without having to go to Austria (thank God)

6 September 2014 9:00 am

Fischer’s is Austria made safe for liberals, gays, Jews and other Untermenschen riffraff, because it is a restaurant, not a…