The Spanish Riding School has trained Lipizzaner stallions in the same repertoire since 1572, making it the oldest continuously operating institution of its kind in the world. The Habsburg court commissioned these white horses from the stud farm in Lipica — then part of the Austrian Empire, now Slovenia — to perfect the classical dressage movements known as airs above the ground, martial exercises born from Renaissance battlefield tactics. Today the stallions perform levades, caprioles, and courbettes in the Winter Riding School, a chandelier-lit baroque hall built by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach in 1735. The Lipizzaner breed itself nearly vanished during World War II. In 1945, as Soviet forces advanced toward Austria, American General George Patton ordered the evacuation of the Lipica stud farm, relocating 250 horses to safety in Bavaria. Without that intervention, the bloodline — meticulously maintained through six foundation sire lines — would have been lost. The Spanish Riding School returned to Vienna in 1955, resuming daily training in the same white-columned hall where Franz Joseph once watched from the imperial box. Visitors attending a Lipizzaner tour Vienna session witness riders in bicorne hats and brown tailcoats guiding six-year stallions through piaffe sequences and pirouettes. Morning training runs Tuesday through Saturday, with the horses working in pairs under natural light from the hall's arched windows. Behind-the-scenes stable tours access the Renaissance stalls where each stallion occupies a numbered box, its nameplate hand-lettered in calligraphy. The tack room holds saddles dating to the 18th century, their leather darkened by centuries of use. Performances in the Winter Riding School follow a script unchanged since Maria Theresa's reign. Riders enter to a polonaise, salute the portrait of Charles VI, then execute a 70-minute program of school quadrilles and pas de deux. The stallions — born bay or black, turning white by age ten — move in synchrony across the tan sand floor, their choreography rooted in the principles Xenophon recorded in 400 BCE. No microphones amplify the hoofbeats. No spotlights break the glow of the chandeliers. The institution preserves its methods not as nostalgia but as a living technique, its riders still mastering the same seat and aids their predecessors learned under the Habsburgs.