AUSTRIA: Salzburg - the birth place of Mozart, prepares to celebrate the 250th birthday of the composer.

Record ID: 582398

  • Title: AUSTRIA: Salzburg - the birth place of Mozart, prepares to celebrate the 250th birthday of the composer.
  • Date: 26th January 2006
  • Summary: WIDE OF SALZBURG CATHEDRAL WIDE OF MOZART BRIDGE ACROSS THE RIVER/ TRAFFIC WIDE OF SALZBURG COAT OF ARMS ON FLAGS DECORATING DOME OF CHURCH
  • Embargoed: 10th February 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Austria
  • Country: Austria
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVA42MOE4QOU747MDYMIYGW6TUJ3
  • Story Text: The hills are alive with the sound of Mozart for his 250th birthday in Salzburg on Friday, and it's music to the ears of businessmen, musicians and tourists alike.
    "This is the best place to be for Mozart, and you feel as if it is 250 years ago," Iyako Ito, a Japanese visitor, said beneath a Mozart statue in this Austrian city. "You can feel him more here ... almost touch him."
    Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart, who later playfully translated his middle name as Amadeus, was born at 8 p.m. on January 27, 1756 in a rambling 12th-century house still preserved in central Salzburg.
    By age three he was playing the clavichord, at five he had written his first compositions and at six he and his older sister "Nannerl" were performing for stunned audiences of kings and queens.
    "Mozart is one of the three greatest geniuses," said Austrian maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt, artist in residence in Salzburg for the Mozart year. Bach and Leonardo da Vinci are his two others.
    "The crowd is just fascinated by the surface but the more educated music lovers can scratch and scratch and come to the bottom and there is something for everybody," he told Reuters.
    Mozart wrote the tunes that keep the whole world singing in elevators and on easy listening stations, from "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" to "Rondo a la Turk", as well as music to sear the soul from the opera "Don Giovanni" to his final "Requiem".
    Farmers play Mozart to cows to increase milk flow or produce more tender meat, mothers play him to babies to boost their IQs.
    Japanese-born pianist Mitsuko Uchida is convinced listening to Mozart boosts your IQ but, unlike most people, she thinks she knows why.
    London-based Uchida, among the world's leading interpreters of Mozart's piano works, will do her bit to raise the IQs of an entire audience on Friday when she performs his Piano Concerto in C at a gala celebrating the maestro's 250th birthday in his hometown of Salzburg.
    It is a concert that probably could not be held without Uchida, whose recordings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and concertos are viewed as gold standards of the classical music world, and one she would not have wanted to miss in any event.
    "I know that he enriches my life to the extent that I would say that life without Mozart would be a sad place," Uchida told Reuters in an interview between rehearsals late on Wednesday at Salzburg's "Festspielhaus", where the gala will be held.
    And what is so special about Mozart that scientists say his music raises IQs in humans, and makes cows give more milk and produce more tender meat?
    Uchida, who has been playing Mozart for decades, says that unlike Beethoven, Mozart never "forces" his music to say something, but in effect lets the notes do the talking for him.
    "With Mozart you have the feeling as if the notes behave the way they want to. It's as if each note were a human being and each one has got a feeling -- one is crying, the other is laughing, one is running, the other one has suffered.
    "I don't know how that happens but that seems to be his world, and there is no one else to that extent."
    It is the deeply human side of Mozart that Uchida says survives the commercialism and hype surrounding a birthday year that has Salzburg, as well as Vienna, where he died at age 35, awash in Mozart souvenirs.
    "A part of me does object, but on the other hand I don't mind if a lot of music by Mozart is being played because of it.
    "People may discover it, some people who may otherwise not have heard him. The same happened also with 'Amadeus', the play (and 1984 film). You may love it, you may hate it but it brought Mozart's music to the general public."
    When Mozart died in 1791, aged 35, he left behind more than 600 compositions, many of them masterpieces. ENDS.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register