Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Wiener Philharmoniker), Austrian orchestra. The first concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, a body of musicians whose principal employment was with the Vienna Staatsoper (the Vienna State Opera), took place on March 28, 1842, at the Grosser Redoutensaal, then Vienna's main concert hall. The conductor was Otto Nicolai, one of the group concerned to establish a professional concert orchestra capable of playing the most difficult new and recent work to the highest possible standard. At first, concerts took place sporadically, and their impetus was further disrupted by the effects of the 1848 Revolution. Carl Eckert conducted a few concerts between 1854 and 1857, but not until 1860 was there a regular series, of eight concerts per season.

That year the Philharmonic moved to the Kärntnertortheater where it stayed until the opening of the Musikverein in 1870. Its first permanent conductors were Felix Dessoff (1860-1875), Hans Richter (1875-1898), and Gustav Mahler (1898-1901). Dessoff introduced to Vienna the then-modern music of Liszt, Wagner, and Brahms. Brahms was the soloist in a performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 with the orchestra in 1871, and two years later conducted the premiere of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Wagner conducted a concert of extracts from his operas in 1872, while in 1877 Bruckner conducted the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 3. Richter conducted the premieres of Brahms's Second and Third symphonies (1877 and 1883) and of Bruckner's Eighth (1892).

Among the Vienna Philharmonic's early 20th-century conductors, Felix Weingartner (permanent conductor from 1908-1927) and the outwardly undemonstrative Richard Strauss were both popular with the orchestra. Clemens Krauss (1929-1933) introduced the famous New Year's Day concert of music by the Strauss family. Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler shared direction between 1933 and 1938, but during the Nazi period Furtwängler had sole charge. Post-war regular conductors have included Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Sir Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein, and Claudio Abbado.

From 1925 the orchestra has also played regularly at the Salzburg Festival. Since 1900 it has toured regularly abroad and made many recordings. Its repertoire tends towards the conservative, but it maintains its reputation as one of the finest orchestras in the world, rich and beautiful in tone in every department, partly thanks to the use of woodwind and brass instruments of special sizes and bores, and partly due to an immense pride in its tradition.

The first self-governing orchestra in the world, the VPO since the 1920s has tended not to appoint principal conductors on permanent contracts. It remains a private institution, and its members are still taken from the orchestra of the Vienna Staatsoper.