Special

Special: Exilarte Anniversary

26. February 2026

Exilarte – Center for Banned Music, which joined our institution as an mdw Research Center in 2016, has now spent two decades devoting itself to the musical estates of individuals who were persecuted, forced into exile, or murdered by the National Socialists—thereby preserving a significant chapter of European music history that might have been lost forever without its efforts.

Report

mdw Goes to School Anna Wukovits-Zethner, Therese Kaufmann

How do art and research mediation relate to pro-democratic awareness-raising? What contribution can research and democracy ambassadors active in schools make to the cultivation of critical thinking as a skill central to democratic action? And how might this be done in actual practice? These questions were the focus of an exchange event at the mdw’s Banquet Hall on 11 December 2025.

Report

mdw’s Pop-Up Advent Calendar

The mdw’s first-ever Pop-Up Advent Calendar this past December saw musical performances play out at various spots all over Vienna—getting the public in the Christmas spirit in a special way and making for unforgettable concert moments.

Report

mdw great talent award: A First-Ever Three 1st Prizes

It was a historic moment for the mdw great talent award powered by Christian Zeller: for the first time since the inception of this competition, all three finalists were awarded 1st prizes—a powerful testament to these young talents’ outstanding quality and the competition’s continual development.

Report

Grätzl Töne: Gasometer Sounds

A Monday in December at the Vienna Gasometers. I’m moving between shops, escalators, and long glassed-in corridors. The four gasometer towers here can be viewed as something like a city-within-the-city, being home to around 1,500 people. Their approximately 220,000 m2 of floor space play host to residential flats, offices, retailers, and cultural offerings. It’s a place of everyday life—and it was precisely here that the fourth edition of the community music series “Grätzl Töne”, which I experienced as an enrolee in the music mediation course “Vermittlung von Musik”, played out

Music

St. Ursula’s Celebrates 350 Years

The mdw’s Church of St. Ursula can look back upon 350 years as an important location for (sacred) music in Vienna. Empress Dowager Eleonora Gonzaga, the widow of Emperor Ferdinand III, brought the Order of Saint Ursula to Vienna in 1660. A central concern of this order, one that they shared with the Jesuits, was to promote education. The small group of invited sisters, who arrived from Liège, first took up residence on Dorotheergasse before moving to Johannesgasse in 1663.

Music

Alumnae in Focus: Liuba & Nadia Kalmykova

It was through the Exilarte Center that the passionate chamber musicians of the Ineo Quartet first came into contact with banned music. And today, string quartets by composers such as Julius Bürger and Hans Gál have become fixtures of their repertoire.

Music

Alumnus in Focus: Salah Ammo

A fascination with different ethnicities and worlds of sound has accompanied Salah Ammo since the very beginning. And thanks to a new master’s degree programme at the mdw, this passionate Kurdish Syrian musician has been able to realise a long-held dream: to engage with the broad field of ethnomusicology as a researcher.

Music

Tristan Murail at the Vienna Days of Contemporary Piano Music

The upcoming 32nd edition of the tradition-steeped Vienna Days of Contemporary Piano Music, scheduled to take place at the mdw from 30 January to 3 February 2026, will feature Tristan Murail as a guest—reason enough to present a brief portrait of this intriguing composer.

Drama

When Images Themselves Become the Stage

Just two-and-a-half months into teaching at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, and one’s already asked to take stock: it can only be mdw Magazine that’s asking! In response, Magdalena Gut—who began teaching courses on stage design and scenography in October 2025—both gladly and adeptly provided us with answers and insights on a field of foremost significance to theatre that’s all too often relegated more than just literally to the background in the performances to which actors and directors give rise.

Drama

Shakespeare in Contrasting Locations

The work Sonettfabrik [Sonnet Factory], specially conceived for the defunct lignite briquette factory LOUISE in Domsdorf, Brandenburg and produced as part of the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s cooperative relationship with the Lausitz Festival, served as that festival’s opening performance. And shortly thereafter, at the palace Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, a version tailored specifically to this location entitled Reinhardt probt Shakespeare-Sonette [Reinhardt Rehearses Shakespeare Sonnets] was performed.

Drama

A Realm of Free Thought

The Iceland-born opera and stage director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson recently teamed up with third-year acting students at the Max Reinhardt Seminar to tackle one of the greatest theatrical tragedies of all time: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In this interview with mdw Magazine, he speaks about the joys of working with a new generation of actors, aspirations for his role as a visiting instructor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, and just why Shakespeare’s analyses of power and people manage to outlast every era.

Drama

Entering into Dialogue with the World

For all of them, it began with everything standing still: the present year’s crop of graduating stage directors at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—Manuel Horak, Lukas Schöppl, and Florian Thiel—commenced their studies at the height of the pandemic. That period’s outward stasis had given rise to an inner urge to move forward—and all three, with their starkly differing life histories up to then, took and passed the entrance examination for the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s stage directing programme.

Film

Award-Winning Examples of International Cinematic Cooperation

Lena Zechner and Melvyn Zeyns study production at Film Academy Vienna. November 2025 saw both of them win German Short Film Awards, Germany’s most important and lucrative form of recognition for short films. These awards are conferred annually in six categories at a ceremony in Hamburg.

Film

In a Military Jacket to Millions in Funding

“Every beginning is precarious” is a statement that holds true for a great many projects in creative and artistic fields. But with their film project SOLDAT, Film Academy students Vivian Bausch and Fabian Rausch experienced the exact opposite. Just how they ended up landing a generous filmmaking subsidy, how it feels to write a screenplay as a duo, and how the two assess the current situation for film professionals in Austria are all things they discussed with mdw Magazine.

Film

The Gender/Queer/Diversity Call of Film Academy Vienna

Featuring portrayals of femininity and masculinity that diverge from existing norms and conventional notions, queer life realities, and questions of social class as well as the thematisation of physical and physical disabilities, the film projects submitted to and supported through the Gender/Queer/Diversity Call make clear the sheer breadth of this thematic field.

Film

Claire Simon: Every Life Is a Film

In conjunction with the Claire Simon retrospective Jedes Leben ist ein Roman [Each Life Is a Novel] at the Film Museum from 17 January to 24 February 2025, the filmmaker herself came to Film Academy Vienna, the mdw’s Department of Film and Television, for a one-day seminar on 20 January. Students had the opportunity to discuss Simon’s films with her at the Arthouse Cinema, the University’s own movie theatre.

Research

mdwHistory: “Moviegoing ended. Her employment at the Academy of Music was terminated.”

Born in Lemberg (today’s Lviv, Ukraine) in 1896 to an assimilated Jewish family, Kremer grew up in Sarajevo until her father—an officer and civil servant employed by the Ministry of War—was transferred to Vienna in 1905. While religion played zero role in her family, education was highly valued: the children were permitted to pursue any avenue of training they desired. Kremer, like her sisters, received her first piano lessons from her mother. At age ten, she continued her pianistic training in a preparatory programme at what is now the mdw.

Research

One Shimmy at a Time

What if questions of social justice could take tangible shape in our own bodies such that we could discuss complex political issues without relying primarily on words? In an era in which disembodied content consumption continues to polarise much of the Western world, my PhD project explores a different mode of collective sense-making: a performative and educational musical theatre practice for adults not necessarily trained in either dance or music.

Research

Review: extended piano techniques. Perspektiven 1981–2018 Luca Lavuri

When looking beyond the piano’s 88 keys and approaching the instrument’s interior, which is often overlooked by pianists and traditionally more the domain of tuners and technicians, a rich sonic world opens up. Katharina Bleier’s Extended Piano Techniques is an extensive volume totalling nearly four hundred pages that offers a broad and well-structured reflection on non-conventional pianistic practices.

Research

Moving Music Education Forward: Research on Music Education at the mdw

When people hear the term “music education”, their first association is frequently with a concrete practice: that of music teaching and musical learning in classrooms, at music schools, in workshops, or in work with people of various backgrounds and ages ranging all the way from kids and teens to seniors. Initially less present in their minds is the research accompanying this practice—research that analyses it, critically scrutinises it, and advances its development.

Music

Drama

Film

Research

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