Vienna

The Minoritenkirche, formal name: Italienische Nationalkirche Maria Schnee is a church built in French Gothic style in the Altstadt or First... District of Vienna, Austria. The site on which the church is built was given to followers of Francis of Assisi in 1224. The foundation stone was laid by Premysl Ottokar II in 1276. Duke Albrecht II later supported the building process, especially the main portal. The Gothic Ludwig choir was built between 1316 and 1328, and used as a mausoleum in the 14th and 15th centuries. Construction of the church was completed in 1350. The top of its belltower was damaged during the first Austro-Turkish war, rebuilt, then again destroyed again during the second Austro-Turkish war; the top was then replaced by a flat roof. When Joseph II gave the church to the Italians as a present, they transferred the name Maria Schnee from a nearby chapel which was subsequently destroyed. The Minoritenkirche stands in the Innere Stadt of Vienna, northwest of the Hofburg, at the Minoritenplatz.
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St. Stephen's Cathedral is the mother church of the Archdiocese of Vienna and the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Cardinal... Schönborn, OP. Its current Romanesque and Gothic form seen today, situated at the heart of Vienna, Austria in the Stephansplatz, was largely initiated by Rudolf IV and stands on the ruins of two earlier churches, the first being a parish church consecrated in 1147. As the most important religious building in Austria's capital, the cathedral has borne witness to many important events in that nation's history and has, with its multi-colored tile roof, become one of the city's most recognizable symbols. By the middle of the 12th century, Vienna had become an important centre of German civilization in eastern Europe, and the four existing churches, including only one parish church, no longer met the town's religious needs. In 1137, Bishop of Passau Reginmar and Margrave Leopold IV signed the Treaty of Mautern, which referred to Vienna as a Civitas for the first time and transferred the Church of St. Peter to the Diocese of Passau.
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The St. Charles's Church is a church situated on the south side of Karlsplatz, Vienna. It is located on the edge of the 1st district,... 200 metres outside the Ringstraße. It is one of the most outstanding baroque church structures, and boasts a dome in the form of an elongated ellipsoid. Ever since Karlsplatz was restored as an ensemble in the late 1980s, the Karlskirche has garnered fame due to its dome and its two flanking columns of bas-reliefs, as well as its role as an architectural counterweight to the buildings of the Musikverein and of the Vienna University of Technology. The church is cared for by a religious order and has long been the parish church as well as the seat of the Catholic student ministry of the Vienna University of Technology. In 1713, one year after the last great plague epidemic, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, pledged to build a church for his namesake patron saint, Charles Borromeo, who was revered as a healer for plague sufferers. An architectural competition was announced, in which Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach prevailed over, among others, Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt.
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Hofburg Palace is a palace located in Vienna, Austria, that has housed some of the most powerful people in European and Austrian history, including... the Habsburg dynasty, rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It currently serves as the official residence of the President of Austria. It was the Habsburgs' principal winter residence, as the Schönbrunn Palace was their preferred summer residence. The Hofburg area has been the documented seat of government since 1279 for various empires and republics. The Hofburg has been expanded over the centuries to include: various residences , the chapel , museums , the Imperial Library , the treasury , the national theatre , the riding school , the horse stables and the Hofburg Congress Center. The Hofburg faces the Heldenplatz ordered under the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph, as part of what was to become a Kaiserforum that was never completed.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the... Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized.
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Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt,... Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. Then his family moved to nearby Iglau where Mahler grew up. As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century. Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age.
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Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and... produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four children of Johanna and Conrad Berg. His family lived comfortably until the death of his father in 1900. He was more interested in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. In late February or early March 1902 he fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a servant girl in the Berg family household. His daughter, Albine, was born on December 4, 1902. Berg had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas.
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Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese... School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 , whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" , though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier . Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art. Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner.
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Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold... Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical technique later known as total serialism. Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amelie who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer — the only obvious source of the future composer's talent. He never used his middle names and dropped the von in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I. After spending much of his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt, Webern attended Vienna University from 1902. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac.
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Theodore Meir Bikel is a character actor, folk singer and musician. He made his film debut in The African Queen and was nominated for an Academy... award for his supporting role as Sheriff Max Muller in The Defiant Ones . Bikel is President of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America and was president of Actors' Equity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Meretz USA, where he also lectures. His autobiography, Theo, was published in 1995. Bikel was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Miriam and Josef Bikel from Bukovina. Being active in Zionism, his father named him after the Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Following the Nazi occupation of Austria, Bikel's family fled to Palestine, where his father's Zionist contacts helped the family obtain British passports. The British Mandate for Palestine was responsible for organizing a Jewish state in Palestine. Bikel started acting while in his teens. He co-founded the Cameri Theatre there—which has gone on to become one of Israel's biggest theaters—before he moved to London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1945.
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Gerhard Weilheim, better known as Gerry Weil , is a Austrian born Venezuelan jazz musician. His first contact with music, started after the allied... victory in Europe during the final days of World War II. Specifically, with the American troops that taught him Glenn Miller's swing and afroamerican music. Weil's musical education started after his inmigration to Venezuela in 1957. At the age of 17, began to take classes from professional musicians. Also, took mail courses from Boston's Berklee College of Music. Between 1974 and 1981, went through a spiritual experience of musical isolation in Mérida, during which he blended Bach piano music with Hindu spiritual genres like Ragas. At the end of this period, returned to Caracas in order to resume his musical career, working also as music teacher. From 1983 started to work with Midi technology, doing this for several year. After that, returns to acoustic music. Gerry Weil has been a producer for artists and groups like Maria Rivas, Desorden Público, Tulio Chuecos, among others. In 2009, Weil received the Decoration of Merit in Gold from the Austrian government.
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Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director. After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over... 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura and Fallen Angel . In the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a number of high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with topics which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction , rape and homosexuality . He was twice nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. He also had a few acting roles. Preminger was born in 1905 in Wiznitz , a town west of Czernowitz, northern Bukovyna, in today's Ukraine, then part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, into the Jewish family of Markus and Josefa Preminger. Preminger's father was born in 1877 in Galicia, at a time when it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire.
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Ludwig Weber was an Austrian bass. Ludwig Weber was born in Vienna in 1899. He initially planned to pursue a career as a teacher and artist when he... discovered his vocal promise and decided to pursue an opera career. In 1919 he began studies with Alfred Borrotau, a well-respected teacher, and had his professional debut in 1920 at the Vienna Volksoper where he sang for a few years in smaller roles. Possessing one of the largest dark-and-cavernous-type bass voices of the twentieth century, Weber was in equally high demand for villainous roles and noble characters. In the mid 1920s Weber he singing in mid size to leading roles with smaller companies throughout Germany. After a successful appearance at the Munich Wagner Festival of 1931 he joined the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1933 and soon began to receive invitations to sing abroad. In 1936 he joined the Royal Opera at Covent Garden where he sang numerous roles for several years including: Pogner, Gurnemanz, Hunding, Hagen, Daland, King Marke, Osmin, Rocco, and Commendatore. In 1945 he became a member of the Vienna State Opera, where he sang a wide repertoire for the next two decades.
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Miep Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family and four other Jews from the Nazis in an annex above Anne's father's business... premises during World War II. She was Austrian by birth, but in 1920, at the age of only eleven, was taken in as a foster child by a Dutch family to whom she became very attached. Although she was initially only to stay for six months, this stay was extended to one year because of frail health, after which she chose to remain with them, living the rest of her life in the Netherlands. In 1933 she began working for Otto Frank, a businessman who had moved with his family from Germany to the Netherlands in hopes of sparing his family Nazi persecution because they were Jewish. Miep became a close friend of the family and was a great support to them during the two years they spent in hiding. She retrieved Anne Frank's diary after the family were arrested and kept the papers safe until Otto Frank returned from Auschwitz and learned of his daughter's death.
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Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and... produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four children of Johanna and Conrad Berg. His family lived comfortably until the death of his father in 1900. He was more interested in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. In late February or early March 1902 he fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a servant girl in the Berg family household. His daughter, Albine, was born on December 4, 1902. Berg had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas.
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Romy Schneider was an Austrian-born German film actress who also held French citizenship. Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach in Nazi-era... Vienna, six months after the Anschluss, into a family of actors that included her paternal grandmother Rosa Albach-Retty, her Austrian father Wolf Albach-Retty and her German mother Magda Schneider. After her parents' divorce in 1945, Magda took charge of Romy and her brother Wolfi, eventually supervising the young girl's career, often appearing alongside her daughter. Her career was also overseen by her stepfather, Hans Herbert Blatzheim, a noted restaurateur who Schneider indicated had an unhealthy interest in her. Romy Schneider's first film, made when she was 15, was Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht in 1953, credited as Romy Schneider-Albach. In 1954, Schneider for the first time portrayed a royal, playing a young Queen Victoria in the Austrian film Mädchenjahre einer Königin .
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