From 1955 on, Prawy served as
dramaturg at the
Vienna Volksoper, and from 1972 as chief-dramaturg at the
Vienna State Opera. Between 1976 and 1982 Prawy was a professor at the Vienna College of Music (
Wiener Musikhochschule, today
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) and lecturer in the field of theater sciences at the
University of Vienna. He also lectured as a visiting professor at numerous American and Japanese universities. He became widely known because of a television and radio broadcast series produced by the
ORF, where he introduced his viewers and listeners to the world of opera and operetta. Prawy maintained close friendships with many prominent singers, composers and musicians, such as
Leonard Bernstein and
Robert Stolz. He was awarded numerous awards and honours in Austria and internationally, including honorary citizenship of Vienna and of Miami. Hardly anyone succeeded in picturing opera for his audience as impressively and fervently as he did, and thus Prawy became an institution as the National Opera Guide (
Opernführer der Nation). In his final years, Prawy was quite frank about his unique, and rather eccentric, method of archiving his enormous collection of theatre programmes, recordings, letters, photographs, personal notes, and similar loose sheets gathered over many decades. Although Prawy lived in a room at the
Hotel Sacher, he invited journalists into the private apartment he was still keeping: it contained thousands of
plastic shopping bags, each of which was carefully labelled so that he could readily access any information he needed. On his 90th birthday in 2001, a special celebration was held for him in the Vienna State Opera. Prawy's death in 2003, of a
lung embolism, was regarded as the passing of one of the last witnesses of an old time gone by and greatly mourned by the public. == Publications ==