Vienna - Austrian Theater Museum

(Local Name: Österreichisches Theatermuseum) The impressive Palais Lobkowitz was built in 1685-87 by Pietro Tencal for Count Sigismund Dietrichstein. In 1709-11 J. B. Fischer von Erlach added a portal and columns in High Baroque style. In the "Eroica Room", with its beautiful ceiling frescoes by J. van Schuppen, Beethoven conducted the first performance of his Third Symphony in 1804 and that of his Fourth three years later. Until 1991 the Austrian Theater Museum had exhibited its extensive collections in a subsidiary building at Hanuschgasse 3. In that year, following nine years of renovation work, the new museum here at Lobkowitzplatz opened its doors to the public. With more than 1,500,000 exhibits it is the largest museum of its kind. In addition to excellent temporary exhibitions on various epochs and famous personalities in the theatrical world, the permanent exhibition - with its 1,000 stage models, 600 costumes and props, almost 100,000 sketches, autographs and posters and about 700,000 photographs - forms a part of theatrical history. In 1938 Stephan Zweig bequeathed to the museum his valuable collection of manuscripts before he was forced into exile by the Nazis and finally committed suicide in Brazil in 1942. At the beginning of the tour of the museum visitors may sit on the imposing "Visitors' Throne". In the adjoining Children's Theatrical Museum there is a slide leading to a puppet show, Punch and Judy and computer games, all aimed at making the young visitors interested in the stage. Children can also pretend to be producers and stage technicians (under supervision only).

Theater buffs will also wish to visit the Memorial Rooms in the nearby branch of the museum at Hanuschgasse. The ground floor is taken up with the collection of the actor Hugo Thimig (1854- 1944), and there are also rooms in memory of the director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), the actor Josef Kainz (1858-1901), the set-designer Caspar Neher (1897-1962), the writer Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) and his wife, the renowned actress Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, the operetta composers Emmerick Kálmán (1882-1953) and Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922) and the theater work of Wotruba and Kokoschka.