Theophil Hansen

In December 1857, the Musikverein celebrated the arrival of a "wonderful, truly imperial Christmas present”. Emperor Franz Joseph I. had given permission for the historic city walls to be razed and thus opened the way for the large-scale expansion planned for the city. Thus the Vienna Ringstraße period began. Numerous buildings – including an opera house, galleries and museums – were to be constructed along the Ringstraße by imperial decree. The Friends of Music had an opportunity to construct a home that would be an integral part of the Ringstraße’s ensemble of architecture. Their plans were appropriately ambitious. Prominent architects, among them Theophil Hansen, August Siccard von Siccardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, were invited to propose designs for the new building. Siccardsburg and van der Nüll, the designers of the court opera, declined the invitation. Hansen remained and proved to be in any case the very best choice. Theophil Hansen (1813-1891) went enthusiastically to work on the commission. Competing with the court opera’s design fired his imagination and encouraged him to seek a new style in the direction of “strict historicism”. In contrast to the architectural proponents of the earlier romantic historicism – among them Siccardsburg and van der Nüll – he explored aspects of High Renaissance architecture. Continuing this approach, he delved still further back via the “Neorenaissance” into classical antiquity. Hansen was quite literally at home here, as the Danish architect had studied and worked in Athens for eight years before arriving in Vienna in 1846. This period had been a formative one and, inspired by classical Greece, Hansen became an exponent of what he termed a “Greek Renaissance”. Hansen’s philhellenism can be seen throughout the Musikverein building: the caryatids in the Großer Musikvereinsaal, the ionic columns and the temple roof in the Brahms Saal, Apollo and the muses ornamenting the ceiling of the Großer Musikvereinssaal, and Orpheus on the pediment atop the front façade all reflect this Greek influence, as does the colour scheme for the building, a perfect example of antique polychromy. Today, numerous buildings along the Vienna Ringstraße bear Theophil Hansen’s signature, with the most famous among them probably being the Austrian Parliament. Hansen was not only one of the most important representatives of historicist architecture in Vienna but also one of the most thorough exponents of buildings as complete works of art: by marshalling all ornamental, chromatic and figurative opportunities to create a unified design, he aimed at the aesthetic harmonisation of both interior and exterior designs. In the case of the Musikverein, his efforts met with exemplary success.