Connoisseur’s Vienna - Art, architecture, music & private visits

With visits to the chief sights as well as lesser ones and little-visited treasures, with privileged access to places not normally accessible and two musical evenings, this tour provides an exceptionally rich and rounded cultural experience. Whether or not you have been to the city before, it will present Vienna in a truly memorable way.

Grandiloquent palaces and labyrinthine mediaeval streets; broad boulevards and quiet courtyards; at times embattled on the frontier of Christendom, yet a treasury containing some of the greatest of European works of art; an imperial city without an empire: Vienna is a fascinating mix, a quintessentially Central European paradox. 

The seat of the Habsburgs, pre-eminent city of the Holy Roman Empire and capital of a vast multinational agglomeration of territories, Vienna is magnificently equipped with buildings which were created by imperial and aristocratic patronage. But the history of Vienna is shot through with diversity, difference and dissent, and some of the choicest items we see were created in defiance of mainstream orthodoxy.

A feature of this tour is several specially arranged visits to private palaces or institutions which are not generally open to the public or are off the beaten track. Because of the privileged nature of these visits we can only name a few of them here, but they include Baroque palaces, nineteenth-century halls, pioneers of modernism, churches and a synagogue.

And then there is the music. As home for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and countless other composers, Vienna is pre-eminent in the history of music. We will confirm musical performances in the spring.