Cultural tours in Austria

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    [name] => The Schubertiade
    [code] => 13125
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    [introduction] => Amid the superb mountain scenery of the Vorarlberg, the Schubertiade is one of the most prestigious and enjoyable festivals in Europe.

Musicians of the highest calibre perform including the Pavel Haas Quartet, Konstantin Krimmel, Marc-André Hamelin, Sophie Rennert.

Excursions to historic towns in the vicinity and an optional hill walk, but time also to relax among ravishing upland scenery.
    [description] => 
The combination of music-making of the highest quality with a pre-Alpine mountain setting is a heady mix. Devotees of the Schubertiade return year after year; addiction is a distinct possibility. Add guided walks and visits in the surrounding area and top up with relaxation among ravishing upland scenery and this begins to sound like the recipe for the perfect holiday for music lovers. 
It takes place in the Vorarlberg, the westernmost province of Austria, with all the concerts in the village of Schwarzenberg, described by the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder as ‘the prettiest village in Europe’. Our tour is based in the neighbouring village of Mellau, seven miles away. 
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    [name] => Vienna at Christmas
    [code] => 10990
    [slug] => vienna-at-christmas
    [introduction] => One of the world’s most beautiful cities – grand boulevards and picturesque alleys, great architecture and outstanding art. 

The Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of Europe’s greatest art galleries, is among the many outstanding museum collections.

Perfectly located heritage hotel.

Includes tickets to two performances, including one at the Staatsoper.
    [description] => 
Vienna was once the seat of the Habsburgs, the centre of the Holy Roman Empire and capital of a multinational agglomeration of territories which encompassed much of Central and Eastern Europe. Today it is an imperial city without an empire. It is a relic, but a glorious relic, and one of the world’s foremost centres of art, architecture and music. 
The Kunsthistorisches Museum ranks with the best of Europe’s art collections, and the Court Treasury is without peer for its historic regalia and objets d’art. The great Gothic cathedral bears witness to the city’s status in the Middle Ages as the most important city in Danubian Europe; the Church of St Charles and numerous Baroque palaces demonstrate that by the beginning of the 18th century Austria had become one of the great powers.
During the 19th century, when the empire reached a peak of prosperity and prestige, a splendid range of historicist buildings was added, notably on the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard which encircles the medieval core. Around the turn of the century there was an explosion of artistic and intellectual activity which placed Vienna at the forefront of Art Nouveau – here known as Secessionism – and the development of modernism. 
Not all is on a grand scale. Tucked behind the imposing palaces and public buildings are narrow passages and ancient courtyards which survive from the medieval and Renaissance city. In Vienna the magnificent mixes with the unpretentiously charming, imperial display with the Gemütlichkeit of the coffee houses.
As with the planning of all our Christmas tours, careful research into seasonal closures and several special arrangements enable us to provide a full programme of visits. 
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    [name] => Mozart in Salzburg
    [code] => 10650
    [slug] => mozart-in-salzburg
    [introduction] => Daily attendance at the Mozartwoche, the annual festival celebrating the composer’s work in his natal city. 

Seven concerts performed by leading orchestras, chamber groups and soloists.

The best-preserved Baroque city in northern Europe in a wonderful alpine setting.

Five-star hotel close to the Mozarteum.
    [description] => 
Salzburg is that rare thing, a tiny city with world-class standards in nearly everything the discerning visitor – and resident – would want. It is miraculous that such charm, and such grandeur, and, above all, such unparalleled weight of musical achievement, should be concentrated in so small a place.
A virtually independent city-state from its origins in the early Middle Ages until its absorption into the Habsburg Empire in the 19th century, Salzburg’s days of glory had all but slipped into the past by the time Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born there. He became the unwitting instigator, post-mortem, of Salzburg’s transformation from minor ecclesiastical seat to the world’s foremost city of music festivals – there are five of them. The Mozartwoche (Mozart Week) held in January every year celebrates Salzburg’s most famous son with musicians famed worldwide for their Mozart interpretations. 
Our tour allows the concerts to be interspersed with a gentle programme of walks and visits to see some of the finest art and architecture in the city. But there is also plenty of free time to relax and gather energies for the performances, and for individual exploration. 
The city has several fine museums, Mozart’s birthplace and later family home foremost among them. The DomQuartier complex is not to be missed, and includes the state rooms of the Residenz, an excellent picture gallery, the cathedral museum and that of St Peter; the cliff-top Museum of Contemporary Art has a café with peerless views over the city.
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            [subtitle] => The annual winter festival
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    [name] => Opera in Vienna
    [code] => 12941
    [slug] => opera-in-vienna
    [introduction] => Four operas – L’opera seria (Gassmann), The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), Don Pasquale (Donizetti) and Madame Butterfly (Puccini).

Productions of the highest quality at the Staatsoper, Volksoper and Musiktheater an der Wien.

Heritage hotel conveniently located near the Staatsoper.
    [description] => 
Not content with being the most important city in the history of western music, Vienna continues to nurture an exceptionally active cultural life of a high level of excellence. Music and opera are cherished by government and citizens in happy concord perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. 
In common with many great cities, Vienna boasts three major opera houses, and our tour takes in all of them. The Staatsoper, Musiktheater an der Wien and Volksoper all have their own distinctive aesthetics and these days are all under dynamic leaderships – witness their vibrant programming.
The first two of the operas we’ll take in on this tour were both premiered in Vienna, both indeed at another famous venue: the Burgtheater, these days the city’s leading drama stage and, in effect, Austria’s national theatre. Leopold Gassmann’s comedy L’opera seria pokes fun at the operatic conventions of the day (1769), its libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi parodying his celebrated senior, Pietro Metastasio. As a ‘meta-opera’, it anticipates such well-loved works as Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos by a century and a half. It will be staged at the Theater an der Wien, which occupies a special place in Viennese music history and is the site of many operatic premieres, from Salieri’s last opera onwards. Beethoven lived in rooms at the theatre for a period and many of his works were first heard there, including the first version of his great opera Fidelio. Subsequent premieres there included Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron, and Lehár’s The Merry Widow.
Gassmann’s premiere coincided with the emergence of Mozart, who in 1786 took Vienna by storm with his incomparable Le nozze di Figaro, the first of his three collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. We’ll see it at the Volksoper — the ‘people’s opera’, located a little way out from Vienna’s grand centre but nevertheless an integral part of the city’s operatic life — in a recent new production by that theatre’s artistic director, Lotte de Beer.
Two popular Italian operas take us to the Staatsoper, one of the high temples of international opera. Don Pasquale was Donizetti’s last operatic comedy, a ‘dramma buffo’ premiered on Paris in 1843 with a cast including four of the most celebrated singers of the day. It remains one of the most popular Italian comic operas and was an immediate success — unlike the now well-loved Madama Butterfly, which flopped at its La Scala premiere in 1904 but after Puccini’s revisions quickly worked its way into audiences’ affections.
All will be introduced during the daily session of talks and discussions. There are also guided tours on foot to a choice selection of Vienna’s art, architecture and musical heritage, as well as plenty of free time for rest, recuperation and preparation for the next performance.
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    [name] => Viennese Modernism
    [code] => 16140
    [slug] => viennese-modernism
    [introduction] => Focus on the key figures in Viennese Modernism: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser and Otto Wagner.

Intensive study of architecture, design and art of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts and early Modernism. 

Perfectly located heritage hotel.
    [description] => 
Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was a city in ferment – a bastion of the established order, a hotbed of radical politics, a crucible of intellectual and artistic revolution. 
As the capital of a multinational empire, residence of Europe’s premier monarchy, centre of an omnipresent bureaucracy and headquarters of a formidable army, Vienna projected an image of unshakeable power and respect for tradition. Lift not the painted veil: behind it lay widespread discontent, a crumbling moral order and myriad cracks in the coherence of empire. With remarkable suddenness, there emerged from this complacent, decadent and artistically stagnant society a brilliant array of artists and intellectuals  who were determined to break with the past and were prepared to risk affronting the establishment in doing so. 
This was the city of Mahler, Schönberg, Schnitzler and Freud, and also of the protagonists of this tour, Klimt, Schiele and Otto Wagner and their friends, collaborators and rivals. The Great War brought Austrian suzerainty of Central Europe crashing to an end, causing death, destruction and trauma along the way. And then the ’flu pandemic of 1918 killed even more, including Schiele, Klimt and Moser.
In the first decades of the twentieth century Art Nouveau in its multifarious manifestations and transformations spread like wildfire around Europe and beyond. In the realm of architecture and ornamentation the Viennese variant was more measured than elsewhere, and more classical. In the first years of the new century, applied ornament retreated further to expose pure form and rational design. Here are the roots of modernism which, in turn, became the dominant orthodoxy of the twentieth century.
By contrast, the revolution in painting and the graphic arts had little international influence, but resulted in works which were exceptionally luxuriant and expressive. 
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