Visiting the Vienna Boys' Choir at Home

Think about famous choirs and your top five will definitely include the Vienna Boys' Choir. Unbelievably, these little angels (well, that’s how they look and sound!) have been singing for over 500 years, and while I was living near Vienna I made sure I got the chance to see them singing in their hometown.

Known in German as the Wiener Sängerknaben, at any one time there are about a hundred members of the choir, and they’re boys aged between 10 and 14 years of age. They live in a boarding school and eat, sleep and breathe choir; in fact there are four choirs, who tour various parts of the world during the year. And they also perform at home in the Hofburg chapel, which is where I had my Vienna Boys’ Choir experience.

Just before Christmas, I was able to stay over in Vienna on a Saturday night, ready for the choir’s performance at the church service on Sunday morning. My day started extra early when my father again confused the time difference from Australia and woke me and the rest of the hostel up with a 5.30am phone call; but by 7am I was getting ready to hop a train into central Vienna and to the Hofburg.

Booking tickets over the internet had been relatively easy, paying 14 Euros to the Hofburgkapelle (chapel) for almost the cheapest seats. There were 5 Euro tickets too, but the website honestly admitted that these seats offered no views of anything at all. However, even our 14 Euro tickets didn’t really let us see much of the mass service, until we stood up behind another row. Along with us in the cheap area were plenty of tourists – and I learnt that the choir must be particularly well-known in Japan, judging by the number of Japanese tourists I chatted with.

In fact, during most of the service, the Vienna Boys’ Choir sang from a high, rear part of the chapel; but at the end of the morning, they moved down to the altar and sang three songs. Some of them really only looked seven or eight years old, and I did wonder what kind of life it was for these talented children who are brought up in a strict boarding house with a busy schedule – but I guess anyone who has belonged to the Vienna Boys’ Choir probably has a good chance of having a successful life. They sang truly beautifully, and the Hofburg chapel was such a lovely setting, and it all seemed a great prelude to the Christmas season.