THE VIENNA OPERA BALL
February · The Vienna State Opera · An Evening · Since 1935
The Vienna Opera Ball is held on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday and closes the ball season. Five thousand guests inside the State Opera, in white tie, until five in the morning.
The Viennese will tell you it is not the best ball of their season. It is the largest, the most watched, and the hardest to enter.
The Transformation
The State Opera does not close. It runs a repertory almost every night of the year, and the single exception is the week of this ball.
The house has about forty-eight hours. The last production is struck. The seats are lifted out of the stalls. A floor is laid level with the stage, uniting stalls, orchestra pit and stage into one surface of some eight hundred and fifty square metres. Boxes are built on the stage itself, and a staircase is put in for the debutantes to come down.
The ball is held. Within days the seats go back and the building is an opera house again.
That is the thing to understand about the evening. It is not held in a ballroom. It is held inside a working opera house that has been taken apart for one night.
The Opening
The ball begins at ten, opened by the Austrian president.
Then the committee: some hundred and sixty couples, the women in white with long gloves and tiaras, the men in tails. They are between sixteen and twenty-four, and they have rehearsed for weeks under the Elmayer school for a performance lasting four minutes.
They come down the staircase, dance a polonaise, and finish on the Blue Danube. Then two words are called across the house, “Alles Walzer”, the ropes come away, and five thousand people go onto the floor at once.
Three quadrilles are danced across the night, at midnight, at two and at four. The steps are called aloud and a great many people do not manage them, which is understood to be part of it.
What to Know
Every room in the building is open, each with its own bar and its own band. Restaurants, a champagne bar, an oyster bar, a casino, a discotheque, and a Heurigen serving Viennese wine inside an opera house.
White tie for men and it is not negotiable. Floor-length for women, and a cocktail dress will not pass the door.
Tickets begin in the low hundreds and boxes run to tens of thousands. The tickets are the easy part. The boxes are held.
It has been cancelled once since the war, in 1991, over the fighting in the Gulf.
The mistake is taking it for the whole of the Vienna season. Four hundred and fifty balls are held in the same weeks, several of them better nights, and the Viennese go to those.
The Court
The Vienna Opera Ball is not the Court’s own. Tickets, boxes and a table are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the evening: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Boxes are the difficult part and are taken a year ahead.
