This year will see Exilarte, Center for Banned Music—founded as a private association and institutionalised as part of the mdw in 2016—celebrate 20 years of existence. In the following anniversary conversation, Exilarte head Gerold W. Gruber surveys what has been achieved and what still remains to be done.

Michael Frischenschlager and Clemens Hellsberg speak with mdw Magazine about this once-in-a-century virtuoso and great humanist on the occasion of his 150th birthday in 2025.

Jan Jiracek von Arnim, who was appointed as the mdw’s youngest-ever professor of piano in 2001 and assumed artistic directorship of the International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna in 2011, talks about proper breathing, dancing lessons’ beneficial impact on music-making, and his ambivalent stance toward competitiveness in the arts.

The 2024/25 winter semester saw baritone Thomas Hampson give a master class on Mahler interpretation at the mdw in collaboration with the Center for Research on Gustav Mahler and Viennese Modernism. Hampson, doubtless one of the foremost singers of our time, met Daniel Ender for a chat in the cafeteria on Lothringerstraße.

It is thus that the festival KlangBildKlang, which will bundle over 50 projects at a wide array of Viennese venues this May and June, can call upon a rich art- and musico-historical tradition. The question as to whether it is possible to render sounds visible and—conversely—render images, colours, and motion audible is to be pursued in a multitude of locations.

Stephan Pauly, Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, on the common roots shared by his institution and the mdw, the Webern Symphonie Orchester, and jointly developed new concert formats.

To numerous Viennese music lovers, Sian Edwards has been a familiar name for many years, now—thanks to her collaboration with Klangforum Wien and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and by virtue of numerous Theater an der Wien appearances conducting works such as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, and Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata.

The academic year of 2020/21 marks the birth of the mdw’s Department of Early Music—and in the following conversation, department head Stefan Gottfried and deputy head Eugène Michelangeli speak about their approaches to historically informed performance and the initial projects of this new department.

Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz in 1968. She began taking trumpet lessons at age seven but had to give up playing later on due to an accident. In 1986, she went to San Francisco and enrolled at the Conservatory of Music as well as at the Academy of Art College, where she studied painting and film. She eventually transferred to the mdw.