University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, known as MDW, is a public university in Vienna. It was established in 1817 by the Society for the Friends of Music and is the largest institution of its kind in Austria, with a student body of over 3,000. It began as a singing school modelled on the Paris Conservatory, with Antonio Salieri as its first director, and by 1827 offered courses in most orchestral instruments. It has carried several names: Vienna Conservatory, Vienna Academy, and from 1909, after nationalisation by imperial resolution, the Imperial Academy of Music and the Performing Arts. It took its current name in 1998, after the 1970 reform gave Austrian arts academies university status.

The university is built around 25 departments. These include the Max Reinhardt Seminar, the Vienna Film Academy and the Wiener Klangstil. Facilities include the Schönbrunn Palace Theater, the Antonio Vivaldi Room, the Salesian Convent, St. Ursula Church, the Lothringerstrasse with the Franz Liszt Room, and the Anton Von Webern Platz main campus. Film studios were completed on campus in 2004. The university organises around ten competitions, among them the International Beethoven Piano Competition, and presents a students' film festival every two years. It is often described as a feeder institution to the major Austrian orchestras, with a particular association with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Teaching is organised by department, and the list runs from composition studies and music production through conducting, keyboard, string, wind and percussion instruments, chamber music and new music, organ and church music, voice and music theatre, to drama, film and television, music education, music and movement education, music therapy, popular music, music research and ethnomusicology, music acoustics, music sociology, and cultural management and cultural studies. The Institute for Composition, Electroacoustics and Tonmeister Training (ELAK) focuses on electroacoustic music, improvisation, contemporary composition and sound art.

The Austrian study programme register lists MDW in the university category as a public institution seated in Vienna, with 97 programmes of all kinds and languages. Four of these are English-taught degree programmes: three Master's degrees and one doctorate, in the subjects of musicology and music.

For an international student, the practical points are these. You apply directly to the university, which sets its own application period and entrance procedure; at a performance institution that procedure usually matters as much as your paperwork. Students from outside the EU/EEA need a Residence Permit for Students. At public universities, EU/EEA and Swiss students pay no tuition within the standard duration of study plus two semesters, while most other students pay a per-semester fee. Every student also pays the student union fee.