In December 1857 Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered that the old city walls and fortifications be pulled down and that a broad boulevard with new imposing buildings be built for the arts and politics. Both Hoft heater theatres (the drama theatre and the music theatre) were to find a new place on the Ringstrasse. The immediate vicinity of the former Carinthian Gate Theatre was chosen for the location of the imperial-royal Court Opera House. The former, a popular theatre dating from 1709, had been pulled down and a competition for the construction of a new opera house was announced, with Eduard van der Nüll and August Sicard von Sicardsburg appointed as architects.

While Sicardsburg was primarily responsible for the technical and innovative work, van der Nüll dealt mainly with the interior’s aesthetic and decorative work. Sicardsburg and van der Nüll became the trend-setters for late Romantic Historicism in Austrian architecture. December 1861 saw the ground-breaking ceremony and in May 1863 the foundation stone was laid. The front, mainly of Istrian stone, is indebted to the Neo-Renaissance arched style. Sicardsburg and Van der Nüll designed a loggia with five further arches over the main entrance so that the first fl oor would be open over the Ringstrasse.

During the WW II.,  the opera was bombed. The building burnt for two days. The auditorium and the stage, as well as almost the entire decor and around 150,000 costumes, were destroyed by the flames, while parts of the former royal lounges at the front of the building remained intact.

As early as 1st May of 1945, under the command of the Russian occupation, the State Opera resumed its programme at the Volksoper (People´s Opera), which had escaped bombing. The Soviet occupation forces had also supported reconstruction of the State Opera so that it could be finished in May 1945. Reconstruction was preferred to plans for erecting a new building elsewhere, since, in the end, it was a question of ‘saving a cultural symbol’.4 The opera construction committee, set up by the Federal Ministry of Trade and Reconstruction, determined the future direction of the State Opera’s reconstruction: the original state was to be preserved combining the opera house’s modernisation with the construction of new buildings for ‘ancillary requirements of the playhouse’s operation’.

The conceptual competition announced on this occasion was open to all architects living in Austria who had neither been members of the NSDAP nor members of any of the defence unions. One of the few architects to meet these criteria was Erich Boltensternm, who had been suspended from the Academy in 1938, and was a colleague and friend of Clemens Holzmeister, who also participated in the competition but whose designs were considered too revolutionary. Boltenstern’s project was preferred with the claim that its author ‘retained the old house’s architectural tradition without resorting to style imitation’

Erich Boltenstern suggested a modernised rebuilding of the theatre in the style of the 1950s, a mélange of late Functionalist and Neo-Classical elements. Due to a lack of financial backing and material, however, it was not finished until 1955. In November 1955, the press reported that about ‘260 million Schillings has been collected by the public’, which represented the annual budget for the whole construction. The theatre’s predominant form with its three loges and two open tiers (balcony and gallery) were retained. Owing to security regulations, the stalls were reduced in number, and the former third and fourth tiers (now the balcony and gallery) were built without columns. In the course of the theatre’s reconstruction, the stage area was rebuilt within the still extant outer walls. Architects Otto Prossinger, Ceno Kosak and Felix Cewela designed the lounges on the first tier.