Discover Wien Modern in Vienna

Wien Modern is a contemporary music festival held in Vienna every autumn. It opens at the end of October and fills roughly the following month with concerts, world premieres and sound installations at venues spread across the city. This guide covers what the festival is, who started it, where it happens, what the music actually sounds like, and how to plan a visit around a programme that runs for weeks rather than a weekend.

The festival was founded in 1988 by Claudio Abbado, then general music director of Vienna, and Bernhard Günther has been its artistic director since 2016. Its main stage is the Wiener Konzerthaus, with concerts also at the Musikverein, and a large share of the programme goes into museums, university halls and rooms that were never built for music.

Explore Vienna on Outhere to see the concerts, exhibitions and performances running in the city, and if you follow music festivals built around a whole city rather than one site, this sits alongside Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.

Wien Modern is Austria's festival for contemporary art music: music written now, by composers who are alive, much of it heard for the first time at the festival itself. A typical edition carries well over a hundred events, from full orchestral concerts to solo recitals, electronic sets, staged works and installations you walk through rather than sit in front of.

It runs once a year, opening at the end of October and continuing through November. That length changes what the festival is. Rather than a weekend where everything competes for the same hours, the programme unfolds over weeks, which gives space to formats that need it: works installed in a room for days, pieces performed in several parts, projects that move between locations.

The audience is a mix. Composers, performers and students from Vienna's music schools make up part of it, alongside people who follow new music internationally and travel for premieres, and Viennese concertgoers who add a few festival dates to an ordinary season.

Claudio Abbado started Wien Modern in 1988, while he was General Music Director of the city of Vienna, a post he held from 1986/87 until 1991. In 1989 he was elected chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker as Herbert von Karajan's successor, and he held that position until 2002.

The festival outlasted his time in the city. It has been staged every year since, and it has kept the same basic commitment, which is that new work belongs in the halls where the repertoire is played, not only in specialist venues on the edge of the scene.

Wien Modern's venue list runs wider than a concert season's. Two large halls anchor the festival. The Wiener Konzerthaus opened on 19 October 1913 and stands in Vienna's third district, Landstraße, between Schwarzenbergplatz and Stadtpark; the Musikverein is about 400 metres away. Both host orchestral and ensemble programmes.

From there the festival spreads. Programming has gone into museums, into halls at the University of Vienna and the mdw, the city's music and performing arts university, into Alte Schmiede, and into rooms around Vienna that were built for something other than music.

For a visitor this means the festival is not one address. A single evening can start in a museum and end in a concert hall across town, and the venue is often part of what the piece is about. Composers write for particular rooms, and the festival books rooms that give a piece something a standard hall cannot.

Contemporary art music is a wide category, and Wien Modern uses most of its width. In one edition you can expect orchestral premieres played by a full symphony orchestra, chamber programmes by specialist ensembles, solo performances, works combining live players with electronics, music theatre, and installations that run in a space and are visited rather than attended.

A large share of the programme is new. Works are commissioned by the festival or given their Austrian premiere there.

It also means the composers are the draw. Programmes are announced by who wrote the music as much as by who is performing it, and the composers whose work appears at the festival include figures such as Olga Neuwirth and Liza Lim.

Bernhard Günther has been the artistic director of Wien Modern since 2016, and the programme of each edition is announced under his direction.

What the current edition is built around is set out further down, in The 2026 Edition.

Erste Bank has awarded its Composition Prize every year since 1989, to outstanding young composers. Since 2002 the prize has been tied to Wien Modern as the venue for the premiere, with Klangforum Wien as the performing ensemble.

The prize carries at least three performances of the new work within twelve months by Klangforum Wien, and it enables the release of the work on a portrait CD on the Kairos label.

For a visitor the prize premiere is a reliable fixture. It is one evening each edition where the programme is a first performance by a composer the prize has chosen to back, played in one of the main halls.

• Choose a strand, not the whole festival. A programme that runs for weeks cannot be seen in one trip. Read the theme, find the three or four productions inside it that interest you, and build a short visit around those dates.
• Allow travel time between venues. Vienna's U-Bahn, tram and bus network reaches all of it, but two events on the same evening in different districts is tight. Look at where each production is before you book both.
• Take the installations in daylight. Works presented as installations usually stay open longer than a concert lasts, so they fit into an afternoon and leave the evening for the ticketed programme.

The 2026 edition is built around ecosystems, and it starts on the river. The opening work is Pia Palme's Mit der Donau, made with the artist Lisa Horvath and created partly inside the Donauauen National Park, premiered by the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien in the refurbished Großer Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Announced alongside it:

• Annea Lockwood, Sound Map of the Danube, which follows the river across more than fifty listening locations.
• Kirsten Reese with the eco-acoustician Sandra Müller, working with the sound of a forest.
• Katrin Hornek with Judith Unterpertinger, on an ascent of a Vienna mountain.
• Jean-Luc Hervé, on insect sound.
• Dimitri de Perrot, on the soundscape below ground.
• Katharina Klement, premiering her Erste Bank Composition Prize work at the Wiener Konzerthaus.

These are the announced highlights rather than the complete programme.

Outhere is a platform for discovering art, culture and entertainment events around the world. Browse what is on in Vienna and across Austria, or look up the concert calendar at the Wiener Konzerthaus and the Musikverein to see how the festival sits inside the city's wider season.

If Wien Modern is your kind of festival, our guides to Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg, the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are good next reads. Start exploring on Outhere and find the next thing worth travelling for.