Sofiensaal 3.46

The Sofiensaal is a concert hall and recording venue located in Vienna, Austria. It is situated on Marxergasse, in the city's third district of Landstraße. The building burned down on 16 August 2001, but it was rebuilt and opened once again in December 2013.Creation and initial useThe building was completed in 1826. It was named after Princess Sophie of Bavaria, the mother of Emperor Franz Josef I. It was originally used as a steam bath and known as the Sofienbad. Between 1845 and 1849, it was converted by the architects August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll into a dance hall and renamed the Sofiensaal. Johann Strauss I performed there regularly and conducted at the opening ball of the house in 1848. Many of the Strauss family's waltzes were first performed there.Use as a recording venueThe building's large, vaulted ceiling, and the pool beneath the floor, gives the hall excellent acoustic properties. For this reason, Decca Records adopted the building as its principal European recording venue for mono recording from 1950 and for stereo recording from 1955 (Le nozze di Figaro conducted by Erich Kleiber, Die Zauberflöte conducted by Karl Böhm, and other Mozart operas) to the mid-1980s. The senior producer of classical recordings for the company for much of this time was John Culshaw, who revolutionised the recording of classical music, particularly opera with the Decca tree. Notable recordings made at the Sofiensaal during this period included the first complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle, conducted by Georg Solti.