VIENNA, May 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Vienna Tourist Board is hosting a unique free event in New York’s Bryant Park on May 31 to celebrate a historic transmission into deep space.
In partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Wiener Symphoniker (Vienna Symphony Orchestra), Vienna will launch Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” waltz towards NASA’s Voyager 1. This interstellar broadcast is part of a larger celebration marking the 200th anniversary of Strauss’s birth and rectifies its omission from the original Voyager Golden Records.
Norbert Kettner, Director of the Vienna Tourist Board, said: “Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made the ‘Danube Waltz’ the anthem of space – the omission of the most famous of all waltzes from the 1977 Voyager Golden Record is a cosmic mistake that we are correcting.”
The event is the culmination of Vienna’s “Waltz Space” campaign, which invited fans to symbolically send a note of the song into space, with 13,743 note sponsors. The campaign aims not just to commemorate Strauss’s birth, but to reinforce Vienna’s status as the music capital of the world, positioning it as a destination full of rich musical experiences.
The free event will take place in Manhattan’s Bryant Park from 1:00 to 5:00 PM:
- 1:00 PM: Pre-show festivities with DJ Kyra Caruso, waltz lessons by Aga Bohun, and opportunities to claim a “SpaceNote”—a unique note from “The Blue Danube”—for a chance to win a trip to Vienna.
- 2:30 PM: Live broadcast of the “Waltz into Space” concert from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), featuring works by Dvořák, Ligeti, Mozart, Josef Strauss, and Ives.
- 3:30 PM: Real-time transmission of “The Blue Danube” into deep space via ESA’s Deep Space Antenna in Cebreros, Spain.
- 3:45 PM: Post-event wind-down with music and refreshments.
The event is free and open to the public. Representatives from the Vienna Tourist Board will be available for interviews.
For press photos, visit this Dropbox-Page. For more information on the “Waltz into Space” campaign, Vienna Tourist Board Newsroom or space.vienna.info. For the event’s website visit space.vienna.info/en-US/new-york-event.
SOURCE Vienna Tourist Board