Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper)

The Vienna State Opera opened in 1869 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, in a Neo-Renaissance building whose reception at the time was so harshly criticised — Emperor Franz Joseph reportedly only said it was "quite nice" — that both architects died before opening night, one by suicide, in what became a dark local legend. The building was heavily bombed in 1945 and rebuilt, reopening in 1955 with Beethoven's Fidelio, a performance treated as a symbol of Austria's postwar cultural recovery.

Today it runs one of the most demanding repertory schedules of any opera house in the world — a different opera or ballet nearly every night across a roughly 300-performance season, rather than the same handful of productions running for months as at many other houses. Music directors have included Gustav Mahler and Herbert von Karajan, and the Vienna Philharmonic serves as its resident orchestra.