Vienna Boy's Choir

Vienna Boys' Choir
Choir
The Vienna Boys' Choir during a 2003 concert at the Wiener Musikverein
Origin	Vienna, Austria
Founded	1498 (519 years ago)
Music director	Gerald Wirth
Headquarters	Palais Augarten
Website	wienersaengerknaben.at

The Vienna Boys' Choir (German: Wiener Sängerknaben ) or Vienna Choir Boys is a choir of boy sopranos and altos based in Vienna, Austria. It is one of the best known boys' choirs in the world. The boys are selected mainly from Austria, but also from many other countries.

The choir is a private, not-for-profit organization. There are approximately 100 choristers between the ages of ten and fourteen. The boys are divided into four touring choirs, named after Austrian composers Bruckner, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, which combined perform about 300 concerts each year before almost 500,000 people. Each group tours for about nine to eleven weeks. Some pieces include "Good Morning" and "Merry Christmas from Vienna Boys".

The choir is the modern-day descendant of the boys' choirs of the Viennese Court, dating back to the late Middle Ages. The choir was, for practical purposes, established by a letter from Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg on 30 June 1498, instructing court officials to employ a singing master, two basses and six boys. Jurij Slatkonja became the director of the ensemble. The role of the choir (numbering between 24 and 26) was to provide musical accompaniment for the church mass. Additionally, the Haydn brothers were members of the St. Stephen's Cathedral choir, directed at the time by Georg Reutter II, who used this choir in his duties for the imperial court, which at the time had no boy choristers of its own.