It is quite certain that when I am in Salzburg I long for a hundred amusements, but here not for a single one. For just to be in Vienna is itself entertainment enough," wrote 25-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1781 from the imperial capital to his father, Leopold, in Salzburg. Mozart lived only 35 years (1756-1791), but he wrote more than 600 musical works spanning every known genre, and the two great Austrian cities associated with him—Salzburg, the city of his birth and early career, and Vienna, seat of the Hapsburg empire, where he spent his most creative years—are observing his 250th birthday in grand style, producing major events all year.
It is ironic that the city Mozart disdained ("Salzburg is no place for my talentÂ…one hears nothing, there is no theatre, no opera") is renowned today for a festival that produces opera and theater of the highest caliber. This summer, the Salzburger Festspiele will mount all of Mozart's known operas and stage works, some of which have never been performed at the 86-year-old festival. The 2006 celebration will also inaugurate a new theater, the House for Mozart, expanding a complex whose construction began in 1925. Vienna makes its own claim on the prodigy with a high-profile, multimillion-dollar festival, dubbed New Crowned Hope, in November and December. It will be directed by Peter Sellars, whose acclaimed productions of Mozart operas—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così Fan Tutte, with updated settings in a luxury apartment in Trump Tower, among drug dealers in Spanish Harlem, and in a diner on Cape Cod, respectively—helped to establish his reputation as one of classical opera's iconoclasts. Elsewhere in Vienna, the composer's anniversary has prompted the city to renovate the Mozart house museum, to mount a major cultural exhibition, and, most significantly, to rededicate a theater as an opera house—Vienna's third—devoted to new drama, dance, and music and, throughout 2006, stagings of Mozart operas.
By offering such an ambitious array of programs, the country's cultural leaders are aiming to ensure that an event like Mozart's 250th anniversary does not end up simply as a platform for Austrian nationalism. Especially since the events of 1989, which unfroze the countries of the Communist bloc, Vienna has again moved to the geographical center of Europe. The city always was a place where one heard a mixture of Central European languages on the streets and in the markets, but it used to have a certain stuffiness you either had to ignore or accept as part of its charm. These days, with the influx of new blood, Vienna has a more cosmopolitan feel, more sophisticated tastes in everything from cuisine to contemporary art—and its pulse seems to have quickened.
Similarly, the stature of Salzburg, 185 miles west of the capital, has grown both in Europe and beyond (Shanghai even chose it as its sister city in 2004). Above all, the international nature of the Salzburg Festival—of its performers, directors, and designers—has given it a singular position among the world's great festivals. In capitalizing on Mozart's birthday, both cities have a great deal at stake. As beneficiaries of cultural tourism, they have the chance to reveal an evolving Austria, one that has much more to offer than powdered wigs and Mozart chocolates.
"It is impossible to describe the rush and bustle," wrote Leopold Mozart to his daughter, Nannerl, on visiting his son in 1785. "Since my arrival your brother's piano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theater or to some other house." In old Vienna people lived on top of one another, an average of 47 to a building, according to a chronicle of 1786. Mozart's apartment was a noisy place—not, we are told, because of the children, but because Mozart would have been making noise. There were rehearsals, music lessons, house concerts, billiard games, and the laughter and conversation on which the composer thrived.
The composer's piano was coming up and down the stairs, to and from the second-floor apartment, every two or three days. Now that very apartment has been newly restored and forms part of a museum called Mozarthaus Vienna.
The museum, on Domgasse, not far from St. Stephen's Cathedral, is the only surviving Mozart home in the capital; he lived there from 1784 to 1787. It was here that he wrote The Marriage of Figaro. It was also here that he and Haydn played billiards and Haydn first heard the string quartets dedicated to him. In one small room, possibly the one where Mozart composed, an extraordinary stucco decoration from the period survives. The upper floors of the house contain displays about the operas, and there's a small performance space that's been carved out of part of the basement.
From Domgasse, the view along Blutgasse—Blood Street, probably named for slaughterhouses that once operated there, though more colorful explanations exist—is essentially unchanged since the composer's day, and one gets a sense of the scale of the city in his time. But you have to forget everything to do with the grandeur of the last Hapsburg era, the vast buildings on the Ringstrasse, the huge museums, and the wide boulevards. You have to think of a compact 18th-century city that retained its medieval foundations. Some of the houses around Domgasse would still have had tunnels linking them to the cathedral for refuge in times of danger.
The impression one has is of a Mozart at the center of a social whirl, in a city that was full of opportunities for him, even if it was also full of frustrations; a man with a natural aptitude for court life, but also a strong sense of his own merits—a figure from the dawn of the modern era, when the ideals of the Enlightenment were fighting it out with absolutism. Herbert Lachmayer, the founder and director of the Da Ponte Institute (named for Mozart's most celebrated librettist), has curated an anniversary-year exhibition on the subject at the Albertina museum. "Mozart/The Enlightenment: An Experiment" (on view through September 20) explores how the Rococo and the Enlightenment were intimately connected and part of the same world. On his computer, Lachmayer shows me a series of images, including a desk owned by the 18th-century French architect Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, who could sit down at a writing table that was all frivolity and curves to produce his celebrated visionary geometric designs. Next, he shows me a dress by Christian Lacroix and a Montgolfier balloon: the dress, he says, evokes the exuberance of the past; the balloon reminds us that Mozart lived in the experimental age of balloon travel. We walk to a nearby building to look at the designs for a Franz West carpet, with which Lachmayer is going to cover the gallery floors of the Albertina, the site of the exhibition. The motif on the carpet resembles an ear; Lachmayer is pleased.
Perhaps the most emblematic enterprise will be New Crowned Hope, the centerpiece of Vienna's international festival, which arrives in the fall. Created by Peter Sellars and named after the Masonic Lodge of which Mozart was a member, its ambitious focus is on new music, theater, dance, film, visual arts, and architecture; it will be produced at venues throughout the city. American composers John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov will premiere an opera and a large-scale choral piece, respectively. Choreographer Mark Morris will present dances set to Mozart piano concertos and other keyboard works, in collaboration with British painter Howard Hodgkin, who is designing the backdrops. Sellars will direct Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's opera about the French philosopher Simone Weil. La passion de Simone marks their third collaboration. Behind the involvement of impressive personalities in the Mozart celebrations is a hope that the events will have an impact beyond the State Opera, the Musikverein—home of the Vienna Philharmonic—and other traditional concert halls, which are all within a mile of one another.
The Theater an der Wien, the city's newest opera venue, is another outcome of the anniversary year. Built in 1801 by Mozart's collaborator on The Magic Flute, the actor and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, it is horseshoe-shaped and intimately proportioned, accommodating an audience of only 1,000. The theater is presenting a series of new stagings of Mozart operas, including The Magic Flute this month, as well as some coproductions with other European theaters, mounted by leading directors. Concerts of contemporary classical music, ballet, and premieres, including the intriguingly titled Odio Mozart (I Hate Mozart), are also on the schedule.
It is well known that early on Mozart was impatient to escape Salzburg, his native town. Like his father, he was in the service of a prince-archbishop of the Holy Roman Empire, and although the musical culture of the prelate's court was elaborate, no operas were produced there. For Mozart—who as a teenager had written stage works for Milan and Munich—opera, the most complex of music genres, provided the greatest scope for financial as well as artistic reward.
Today, Salzburg can lay claim to one of the world's most distinguished and well-established operatic festivals. The Salzburger Festspiele began in 1920 and from the start was associated with distinguished names: Richard Strauss, the composer; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the dramatist and librettist; Max Reinhardt, the producer and director. In the first year, Jedermann, Hofmannsthal's version of the 15th-century English morality play Everyman, was staged on the steps of the cathedral square—where it is still performed to this day. Reinhardt, one of the first modern stage directors, whose productions in Europe spurred major revivals of classical drama and Shakespeare, had an influence on the festival that has endured as long as Jedermann.
By 1926, the colonnades of the Felsenreitschule—Salzburg's open-air riding school, cut into the living rock of the great natural ridge that overhangs the city—had been adopted as permanent sets for experimental productions; not long after, the extensive old stable buildings that had belonged to the archbishop of Salzburg were taken over, to become the Festspielhaus.
The architect responsible for creating these venues was the modernist Clemens Holzmeister. As the festival increased in international fame, providing a showcase for Austrian culture and Mozart in particular, the various parts of the current theatrical complex were added on. But after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, Holzmeister, a devout Catholic, was forced into exile and spent much of World War II in Turkey, where he stayed until 1954.
On his return to Austria, Holzmeister rebuilt the complex, digging back 46 feet into the cliff and, from 1956 to 1960, creating an enormous stage, the Grosses Festspielhaus, to accommodate productions from the open-air Felsenreitschule when they were rained out. The auditorium, with its wide proscenium, was intended for large stagings; a Kleines Festspielhaus was also created, for smaller productions.
This theater is now being renovated and will be finished just in time for this summer's festival. Rechristened the House for Mozart, it will gain a new intimacy as well as improved acoustics and sight lines, and should be ideal for authentically scaled productions of 18th-century repertoire and for performances involving period instruments. The first program, a highly anticipated new production of The Marriage of Figaro with a cast that includes the soprano Anna Netrebko, led by the eminent conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, will debut in July.
Besides presenting Mozart's complete stage works, the festival administration is looking to the future, with commissions of new music from 15 composers. Significantly, this year's final concert, in August, has no music by Mozart; instead, it is devoted to premieres of contemporary scores. The last notes to be heard at the Salzburg Festspiel of 2006 will be exclusively from 21st century composers.
Moreover, The Magic Flute—remarkably, the festival's second new production of the opera in two years—will be staged by Pierre Audi, the current artistic director of the Netherlands Opera and former director of London's Almeida Theatre. Salzburg's 2005 production of the singspiel failed to please either the audience or the management. Like Sellars, Audi is known as a visionary and noted for his bold reimagining of standard repertoire; in spite of the cost, Salzburg clearly felt it had to make a better attempt at one of Mozart's most popular works.
Mozart wrote The Magic Flute in the last year of his life. It explores humanity's quest for love and enlightenment, and was a novel project for the composer, who conceived it for Vienna's popular-theater audience rather than for the court. In shaping his Viennese festival, Sellars took the idea of hope as a theme—finding in Mozart's life and works its exemplification. Two hundred and fifty years after the composer's birth, Salzburg and Vienna resonate with his music, and with the vibrant new work it inspires.
James Fenton is the author of The School of Genius, a history of London's Royal Academy.
