Travelers Discover the Cool Side of Old-School Vienna
An influx of residents has the Austrian capital bustling with creative energy and new reasons to visit
The crowd in Salon Paradise, the basement bar of the Hoxton Hotel.
Photographer: Michaela Nagyidaiová for Bloomberg Businessweek
At the Vienna State Opera, the crowd dresses the part. Clambering up the stairs to the standing section, where I scored a last-minute, €15 ($17.50) perch to watch Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, I pass women in gowns and men in tuxes — at least three of them with gilded canes. The coat check is stuffed with so much fur, it looks like a petting zoo.
But as the altitude rises, the audience transforms. Up in the cheap seats, it’s not all sequins and pocket squares. The millennials and Generation Z opera lovers who make up the new class of Viennese tastemakers are dressed in jumpsuits and leather jackets. I overhear French, German, Polish, Portuguese and Russian. The buzz is evident, and it’s not just coming from the brass instruments.