The Salon Razumovsky

The eponymous family, on whose behalf both the old and the new Razumovsky Palace were built, settled in the Viennese area rather late, hardly more than 200 years ago. The old palace, still called „Rasumofsky“ according to the transliteration from the Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet at the time, had a very colorful history, in keeping with its builder count Andreas Razumovsky
However, the Neue Palais does not go back to Andreas, but to the descendants of his younger brother Gregor Razumovsky. Due to his keen criticism of the purely autocratic tsarist rule and the cruelty and brutality with which “commoners” were treated in Russia around 1811, he saw his salvation in the West, ultimately to be sought in the Habsburg Empire. Eventually it was the wife of Gregor’s grandson, countess Marie Razumovsky, who commissioned the construction of the new palais. This was completed in 1902, a century after the palace in Rasumofskygasse. Still in the spirit of Musil’s “possession and education”, the “last Viennese baroque architect” Ludwig Tischler planned and carried out the construction of the new palace at the request of the art sponsor Marie Razumovsky, both as a place of residence and as a haven for art and culture. The original intention of the builder to run a “salon” for cultural events could only be realized for the period 1902 to 1938. The period of turmoil of the post-war period finally contributed to the fact that it was not until a century later that Marie’s great-grandson Gregor Razumovsky managed to bring the representative rooms of the Palais to a new blossom in 2015.
At the heart of the salon is the Mariensaal, in which the actor Walter Davy, having just returned from the war as an invalid, played theatre with friends in 1948, which he later remembered with pleasure. Around this hall there are three rooms, initially the “hunting-style” dining room with dark-stained panelling, as well as a reception salon and a library. These rooms became the scene of encounters of some great figures of Austrian culture of the second half of the 20th century, such as Heimito von Doderer, Friedrich Torberg, Hilde Spiel, Milo Dor, Gottfried von Einem or Thomas Bernhard, who were friends of Andreas Razumovsky (1929 to 2002).
Gregor Razumovsky has been organizing chamber concerts of all kinds and encounters on political and cultural issues in the library in the Mariensaal since 2005. In the past 15 years, over 100 musical events and a further 50 political evenings have taken place in the Salon Razumovsky.