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.

In the arts, it is possible for multiple superlatives to exist side by side—for which reason this author hopes it won’t be taken amiss that he considers the concert series “Echo of the Unheard” to be the most important one in Viennese musical life. This series affords an experience of how an entire, fully valid era of music history exists of which Arnold Schönberg, Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Egon Wellesz, Erich Zeisl, Ursula Mamlok, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ruth Schönthal, and Marcel Rubin are just a few representatives among the approximately one hundred composers whose works it has included so far.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender were guests of Austrian Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen from 21 to 23 October of last year. It had been 28 years since a German federal president had last made a state visit to Austria.

The initial reactions were admittedly sceptical when a veritable recorder afficionado contacted us from Boston, USA to announce his desire to stage a competition for recorder students at the mdw in memory of his Israeli father Hans Lewitus, who had been active in Peru—initially as a clarinettist and eventually also as a player of the recorder, for which he went on to arrange and compose numerous works.