Wiener Singverein

They don’t make a living from singing, but in many ways live for singing. For more than 150 years the singers of the Wiener Singverein have demonstrated that amateurs can make music at the highest level. Since its foundation, the choir of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna has been one of the best concert choirs in the world.

The term ‘amateur’ means ‘a lover’. And it was music lovers who founded the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna in 1812. In 1858 the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was founded as an offshoot of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.

With Johann Herbeck as choral director, this newly-formed chorus was of a very high standard right from the start, and became a sought-after interpreter of world premieres. In 1867, for example, the Singverein gave the premiere of the first three movements of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem and in 1898 it gave the first complete performance of Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri (including the ‘Ave Maria’). It was also the choir for the world premieres of Bruckner’s Te Deum, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Franz Schmidt’s oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln.

With Johannes Prinz, choir director since 1991, the Wiener Singverein entered the 21st century as a much sought after and stylistically extremely flexible concert choir. Today, the choir works regularly with internationally famous conductors. In the 2021/22 season it performed under Simon Rattle, Alain Altinoglu, Martin Haselböck, Stefan Gottfried, Klaus Mäkelä, Daniel Harding, François-Xavier Roth, Christian Thielemann, Yutaka Sado and Franz Welser-Möst.

The Singverein’s artistic home is the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, and its many commitments have had a profound effect on concert programming there.

The choir also makes regular international guest appearances. In 2022 it performed at the Grafenegg Festival. In summer 2021 it performed in Britten’s War Requiem at the Salzburg Festival, and in the autumn it was a guest in Luxembourg, participating in Mahler’s Third Symphony under Gustavo Gimeno. In the 2017/18 season the choir sang in Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt in Leipzig, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo. In its recent Salzburg Festival appearances the choir has performed under Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Christian Thielemann, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and, in 2022, Franz Welser-Möst.