Happy Birthday Mozart.

If I could, I would be in Salzburg today to raise a glass to Mozart. Wolfgang is on my list of the five people I would like to meet in heaven.

Bird

I'm glad I'm not in Salzburg because I'd have no idea what to buy him. ;-)

And Mozart would also be glad he isn't in Salzburg (he may be buried there i don'tknow but as a living being he detested the place)- NPR had a lengthy discussion of how much he hated Salzburg - his words about his native city were very harsh - how he couldn't wait to get out - and now Salzburg is capitalizing on Mozart!

I'm listening to a Mozart concerto just now. For 250, he sounds great!

Bird, care to list the other four on your list?

PalQ,

I don't think it was that Mozart hated Salzburg, it was that he hated his employer (Arch Bishop Somebody?) who treated him rather poorly. I bet he would have stayed in Salzburg his whole life if his employer would have shown him some respect.

mvor - One person I hope to meet is God, as the alternative seems unpleasant.

mvor, I'm also enjoying the live concert on WQXR in NYC. Lovely, isn't it?

Bird:

Yeh he hated the archbishop but he also hated the city - several quotes have him saying exactly that - he considered it so provincial and couldn't wait to get to a cosmopolitan place like Vienna.

We don't have to be in Salzburg to raise a glass. We don't even have to be in Austria to raise a glass. What the heck, it doesn't even have to be a birthday to raise a glass LOL

Mozart isn't bured in Salzburg, didn't you see Amadeus? Even when that was his official residence, he traveled an awful lot of the time, anyway.

I don't think he would have stayed in Salzburg regardless. Like any up-an-coming artist or musician, he wanted to go to the epicenter of that and went to Vienna like many other musicians (aside from his many tours). Salzburg was the sticks.

Bird, touché...that's what I get for being so nosy.

Margaret, I'm actually listening to a CD but thanks for the heads up. Alas, I can't listen to WQXR on my computer since I have a MAC. Enjoy the concert!

Faina, I'll raise a glass along w/you!

mvor, WQXR can be accessed via AOL radio if you can access that. A little while ago I listened to all the churches in Salzburg tolling the time of Mozarts birth. Very moving. And the concert has been wonderful - I'm at work in my very conservative Wall Street office with "ears" on but wild horses (or the Chairman) couldn't make me miss this!

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~rb5h-ngc/e/k527.htm

click on where it says midi to hear some Mozart.

Volfee...

(the wife calling Wolfgang in Amadeus)

CBC Radio2 began a three day Mozart extravaganza at 6am EST this morning. For details, here's the website:

http://www.cbc.ca/mozart/schedule.html

You can listen on-line.

Today, on public radio, I heard Thomas Hampson singing arias from Mozart's operas. I love to tell people that I had the same singing teacher as Thomas Hampson. Impressive, no? Actually I have a lousy voice. My singing was in a required class in liturgical music in a Catholic girls'high school. Many years later the teacher taught Thomas Hampson. But still....

"Amadeus" was a fine play and film, but any resemblance to the truth was largely accidental. Whatever, happy birthday, Wolfgang. During the last week we've had a feast of his music on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national FM network, and it never grows stale. Last heard, the sublime clarinet concerto. He wasn't quite in the same league as J. S. Bach, but a close second.

BTW, Bird, who are the other four?

Yes, what wonderful music from Mozart that we all treasure as we honor his 250th birthday. When in Vienna we heard Strauss music but also an interesting Mozart concert by (of all things) a mandolin orchestra from Japan). In the second half they had exerpts along with some local actor portraying Salieri ala the Amadeus film. Was there anything to Salieri being driven to madness or his prodding Mozart's writing of the Requiem? I wonder if the film was as Neil_Oz implies purely fiction.

ozarksbill

Christina,

I've always thought that Mozart was buried in a mass grave in Vienna, but there has been some speculation that his body was brought back to Salzburg and placed near his father and his wife Constanze. Maybe this is just a marketing ploy by the Salzburgbers to reclaim Mozart, but it adds intrigue.

The Milos Forman film drawn on Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus is a work of mostly fiction,and some say "borrowed" liberally from Rimski Korskov's opera Mozart and Salieri.

Salieri was a great composer in his own right and it is too bad this film made him look so one dimensional and weak.

Maybe the events of last week will help kindle more interest in the "real" Mozart.

I know about the film and that everything in it is not absolutely factual, but I thought if one saw the film one would know Mozart didn't live in Salzburg at the end of his life and wasn't buried there.

I have never read or heard anywhere that Mozart's body was secretly moved to a cemetery in Salzburg from Vienna's St Marx village cemetery. Where did you read such a thing, that his body was buried in Salzburg? They retrenched the cemetery eventually as they do in some older cemeteries, and removed a lot of the bones, including probably Mozart's (from the Vienna cemetery). That was after years, so no body was left and couldn't be, only bones. Some people alive at the time of his burial and later during the retrenching supposedly saved his skull and they had it in some Mozart Foundation or place, and I think that could have been sent to Salzburg (as with most things, I don't know if everyone thinks it is completely authentic). I know his father and some other female relatives are buried in Salzburg. I think they did dig up some of those bones to try to to some DNA samplings, perhaps to check out if the skull was authentic, I don't know the end of that.

I don't think it's possible that Mozart's entire body was buried in Salzburg because it would have been decomposed by the time they dug that cemetery area up, and there would be more written about that.

Interestly, I just did a google on Mozart and skull to see if there were any recent news, and there was a CNN article on it just this month saying DNA tests were inconclusive on that skull and they weren't even sure the other bodies were his relatives.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Musi...ria.mozart.ap/