Happy 250th, Mozart
Published 9:00 pm Friday, January 27, 2006
SALZBURG, Austria – Hot rock and cool jazz mixed with the classics in Salzburg on Friday as Mozart fans spilled from museums and concert halls into a floodlit main square in an exuberant 250th birthday bash.
As the city of his birth, Salzburg claimed first rights in the international celebrations, showcasing him in a dozen events that displayed not only his musical mastery but his life, loves and pastimes.
Salzburg church bells pealed at 8 p.m., the hour of his birth. Posters sprinkling the city proclaimed “Happy Birthday Mozart,” while the daily “Salzburger Nachrichten” displayed a full-page portrait of a serious-looking “Wunderkind” sitting at the harpsichord, with the headline: “Salzburg celebrates its great son.”
But it was mostly Mozart just about everywhere else as well as the world celebrated his musical gift to the world with concerts, opera performances, marathon classical broadcasts and other events.
Giants of classical music sang the praises to the creator of more than 600 works, including some of the most beautiful music ever written; the lover of scatological jokes; the impertinent youth who talked back to Austrian Emperor Joseph II after he criticized his “Abduction From the Seraglio.”
“He comes from another star,” declared conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt as he grappled to define Mozart in his entirety.
Others put it more simply.
“I have CDs of him playing all day,” said medical company sales director Peggy Taylor of Richmond, Va., as she prepared to go Mozart hopping from Salzburg to Vienna. “He brings me back into balance.”
And for Salzburg cabbie Andrea Gautsch, “Mozart came with mother’s milk.”
In Sweden, state radio set up an Internet radio station broadcasting Mozart music for 24 hours playing “Wolfie’s hits and misses.” Public television also honored Mozart with a 12-hour special.
Orchestra halls and opera houses performed his works in Moscow, Washington, Prague, London, Paris, Tokyo, Caracas, Quito, Havana, Mexico City, Taipei, Budapest, Beijing and scores of other cities worldwide.
America’s oldest orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, got a jump on the birthday by playing an all-Mozart program on Thursday night. The program, being repeated Friday and Saturday, included the orchestra’s first-ever performance of the uplifting “Coronation Mass,” which Mozart wrote in 1779. The New Jersey Symphony was nearing the conclusion of a three-week Mozart festival that included a community play-in of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” on Saturday afternoon at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
Many classical radio outlets worldwide were reprogramming for the day to play only Mozart.
