The theatre that isn't there anymore

The hotel on your right is world famous for a cake, but until 1870 this corner held the Kärntnertortheater, the city's grandest stage, with its entrance roughly where that awning hangs today.

 

That's where the Ninth Symphony premiered on the seventh of May 1824. Beethoven stood on the stage, turning the pages of the score and signalling the entries, though the real conducting was in the hands of the Kapellmeister, because by then the composer was almost completely deaf.

 

When the piece ended and the hall rose to applaud, he kept his back to the audience, since none of it reached him. One of the soloists, the contralto Caroline Unger, came over and turned him around so he could see what he couldn't hear. The story has been retold so often that it almost sounds too perfect, yet several people who were there wrote it down independently of one another.

 

The theatre's disappearance has a plain explanation. Once the new opera house on the Ring opened, there simply wasn't an audience for two venues of this size, and the old building came down.

 

Not a single stone survives from the hall where this happened, only the spot beneath your feet.

 

We walk around the corner to the square across from the Albertina.