2015: Eurovision Song Contest in the Wiener Stadthalle

Conchita Wurst’s victory brought the ESC back to Vienna. The Hofburg palace—the venue in 1967—was now too small for the contest and so the Wiener Stadthalle was chosen. Yet parallels with 1967 remained. The Vienna Boys’ Choir performed and—one year after Russia’s annexation of Crimea—Austria presented itself as a bridge builder between East and West. Although there had been no ESC orchestra since 1999, two classical orchestras appeared in the 2015 show—not as part of the contest but to emphasize Austria’s importance as a country of music. At the start of the broadcast, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played the Eurovision theme (Te Deum by Marc-Antoine Charpentier), the opening bars of The Marriage of Figaro and an excerpt from the 4th movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens. At the Stadthalle, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra performed Rise Like a Phoenix.

In April 2014, the Wiener Stadthalle changed its postal address from “Vogelweidplatz 14” to “Roland-Rainer-Platz 1”. Architect Roland Rainer, who designed the Stadthalle, was awarded several public commissions in the Second Republic despite having supported biologistic and racist architectural concepts during the Nazi period. Rainer kept quiet about his Nazi past but it had been public knowledge since at least 1993 due to a controversy in the journal FORVM . In 2015, the former director of the Architekturzentrum Wien, Dietmar Steiner, described Rainer as the “Waldheim of architecture”. In the run-up to the 2015 contest, a civic initiative campaigned to rename the square. City politicians promised to add an explanatory plaque giving historical information about Rainer to the street name sign—but this never happened.