Schönbrunn Palace in autumn
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the most prominent figure in the history of the city of Vienna, and his influence has even gone beyond the history of music to become the pride of Austria, the pride of Europe, the pride of the human race on earth. However, Vienna in Mozart's time did not treat this "darling of God" kindly, thus causing the latter to suffer humiliation, poverty, and contempt here. Vienna, a place where Mozart and those who like to sympathize with him, have been everywhere since Mozart's death more than two hundred years ago, and it is the "city of Mozart" that is unavoidable.
Statue of Mozart in the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace
Mozart's four visits to Vienna from Munich to Vienna in 1781 before his union with the Catholic Church of Colorado did not leave a definite relic for today's people to admire, and the house where he lived was vacant and a new building stood. Of course, the royal palace and Schönbrunn Palace that he visited are still well preserved, and the hall where Mozart performed music as a child also has a special symbol, and to this day, they are still the halls of Mozart's music. The orphanage at Rennweg 91, southeast of Vienna, also has some connection with Mozart's visit to Vienna in 1768, where Mozart wrote a Mass in G major (K.49) for the orphanage church choir, where he later premiered his Solemn Mass in memory of his mother. Manuscripts of both works are now stored here.
Mozart eventually decided to settle in Vienna out of a series of fortuitous events. First, his deteriorating relations with his father and the Archbishop prompted him to leave Salzburg, and when he was called by the Archbishop to Vienna to meet him, he was unexpectedly reunited with the mother and daughter of Weber, who had just moved from Munich to Vienna, and the eldest daughter, Alosia, who had been the object of Mozart's love affair, and now she was married to Vienna's most popular court actor, Joseph Lange, and fortunately her three sisters felt the warmth of the family with the admiration and meticulous care of Mozart.
Mozart memorial plaque on the German Monastic Building
"Eyes of God" site
In the spring of 1781, Mozart took up residence in The Haus des Deutschen Ritterordens, the residence of The Archbishop of The Colonial In Vienna, at 7 Singerstraße near St. Stephen's Basilica. The building, now fully occupied by commercial companies, was inaugurated in 2006, "Mozart's Year", and a sign on the façade of the building mentions that Mozart had been stationed here and writes a sentence from Mozart's letter to his father. It was here that Mozart rebelled against the impolite insults of the archbishop, ignoring the archbishop's retention and resolutely offering his resignation. One morning when I was passing by this place on my way from the cathedral to the city park, standing at the door of the still grim-looking building, imagining the "ceremony" of Mozart being expelled from the court by the angry archbishop, the fat chief of guards, Count Alcor, carried the skinny Mozart out the door and kicked him in the ass. Mozart was completely relieved, and in a letter to his father he said: "The human heart is noble, and it can also become noble." "Although I have lost my title, I feel in my heart more honorable than many titles, and whether it is a servant or a count, if you insult me, you are a scoundrel."
In fact, Mozart had already moved to St. Peter's Church before he offered his resignation. The "Zum Auge Gottes" building at 1 Milchgaße, next to Peterkirche, lives with Wilber's mother and daughter, and he is carefully cared for by the mother-daughter four, and even though some biographers call this "care" a conspiracy of Mrs. Weber, I still think Mozart enjoyed unprecedented happiness during this time. His love affair with Constante is sincere and credible, and he transfers his enthusiasm for his sister Alosia to his younger sister, who is undoubtedly the most thrifty and understanding girl in the family.
More than two hundred years later, standing in front of me is also a new building, with a relief of "God's Eyes" above the gate, a stone inscription on the wall that Mozart lived here, and a special note that he composed the opera "Harem Escape" here. There are also a few lines of small lettering under the plaque, to the effect that the current building, built in 1897, has replaced the old building.
News of Mozart's passionate love affair reached Salzburg's father, who was adamantly opposed to the marriage and wrote several angry letters to Mozart. Mozart was indeed a man with a good heart and a responsible heart, and he patiently explained to his father why he loved Constance. To calm his father's anger, he promised to move out of Wilber's house as soon as possible to find a house for himself. The house is actually less than a stone's throw away from the Eye of God building, but from the north side of St. Peter's Church to the south. A window in the entrance corridor of a modernly decorated building at 17 Graben Straße, which includes a large shopping mall and restaurant, hints at Mozart's relationship with it, where mozart not only completed the "Harem Escape" but also composed the famous "K.385" (Hafner Symphony), during which time Mozart's exact date of the 4th floor of the building with house number 1175 was from September 5, 1781 to July 23, 1782, during which time he still visited frequently "The Eye of God", the relationship with Constantazi continues to escalate, from the engagement to the marriage, he has been trying to persuade his father to agree to the marriage. Coincidentally, the heroine of "Harem Abduction" is also called Constante, and when Mozart writes an aria for her, he often can't distinguish between the two Constantes, the opposition of his father, the circulation of rumors, Mozart's love and hate for members of the Weber family, and everything that happens in reality helps Mozart to create a series of "real" characters in "Harem Abduction" with distinct personalities that are different from the previous opera stage.
In this house, Mozart received visits from Joseph Haydn. The latter praised Mozart's genius: "Mozart, I have finally found you, this is a real gift from God to me!" I'm coming to Vienna so that I can learn more from you! I feel like something is still asleep in me and you can wake them up! What a touching word! I stood in front of this building, reminiscing about Haydn's selfless and sincere praise, and feeling the happiness of Mozart's sincere friendship.
After the performance of "Harem Escape", Mozart defied the obstruction of his father and Madame Weber, and planned a scene of "'Eye of God's Abduction'", he instigated Constante to run away from home and live with him in the house of Baroness Walterstadt, and finally forced Whiber to agree to their wedding at St. Stephen's Basilica on August 4, 1782. The next day, Leopold's letter of acceptance of the marriage also arrived, much to Mozart's delight, and he wrote back to his father describing the wedding scene.
St. Stephen's Basilica
◆ Where Mozart and Constante were married
He was finally independent, finally free. He was no longer bound by anyone, and without hesitation he refused Madame Weber's offer to live with them, and together with Constancé rented a spacious and inexpensive house at the quieter 14 Wipplingerstraße. Mozart and his father had lived here fifteen years earlier when they came to Vienna, and in this house full of memories, the newlywed Mozarts had for the first time a real two-person world.
Constante
At the beginning of the new year in 1784, the Mozarts moved back to Grabenstraße and settled in the home of the famous printer and bookseller Trattner, whose wife was Mozart's piano student, and the family was very kind to Mozart, but Constantine was a little jealous of the young and beautiful Madame Trattner. Their first child had tragically died on their return to Salzburg the previous summer, and now Constante is pregnant with a second child.
After the birth of the child in September, Constante was anxious to move out of the area. They soon found a "luxury" residence with a large living room of five or six rooms on the third floor of the Albert Camesina building in Domgasse, next to St. Stephen's Basilica, which was perhaps the most ideal residence of Mozart's life, with a palatial plaster-trimmed ceiling at the top of the hall, and Mozart even had a special "billiard room" to satisfy his and his friends' hobbies. The rent was, of course, too expensive, more expensive than Leopold's salary for a year. However, this year Mozart went too smoothly, and the success of the performance of "Harem Escape" brought him thousands of guilders of income, and if this momentum can be maintained in the future, the rent of nearly five hundred guilders a year should be affordable.
The former Camercina building has now been renamed "Figaro Haus" because Mozart wrote the opera The Marriage of Figaro during his residence here, and the premiere was a great success. Mozart lived here for less than three years, the happiest three years of his life, his father lived here for ten weeks, Haydn said to Leopold the highest praise for Mozart when he visited, and the playwright and theater manager Sikaned came here to agree with Mozart on the outline of the play for The Magic Flute.
On December 6, 1791, the day after Mozart's death, his body was sent to St. Stephen's Basilica for his funeral, and when passing through Church Lane, Joseph Lange, Constancze's brother-in-law and Mozart's brother-in-law, said to another brother-in-law, "In this house he had the happiest time in Vienna, and after moving away he began to decline. Yes, Mozart also moved to landstraße, a suburb with extremely cheap rents, and later died at 8 Rauhensteingasse, which was demolished in the middle of the last century, and in the early 1960s a new shopping mall "Steffl" was built on the site, and today only the "Friends of Music" donated monument in 1927 can be remembered as the homecoming of musical geniuses.
One late autumn evening, I walked to the "Figaro House" in Church Lane, and the window facing the street was lit with warm lights, which made me feel no sadness in my heart. The large-scale renovation before the "Mozart Year" no longer maintains the vicissitudes of history, everything is new, new layout, new exhibition rooms, many precious historical relics are displayed in new glass display cabinets, and several walls of Mozart's era are deliberately preserved, a bit like the products of archaeological excavations. Now only the gate on the ground floor is primitive and made of spruce wood.
The exhibition rooms on the third and fourth floors, plus the store on the second floor of the adjacent building, have a total area of more than 1,000 square meters. It is said that the large-scale renovation was funded by a Japanese consortium, so several Japanese people were taking care of the memorial hall, and even the salesman of the store was an elderly Japanese woman. Of course, most of the people who came here to visit were Japanese, and I hardly saw anyone from other countries that night. There are many Mozart admirers in Japan, who come with a pious mood, very quietly and carefully look at the mozart-related things, and then go to the store to pick out a large number of souvenirs.
"Figaro House" in the Quiet Of Night
My feeling about Mozart's happy time in the "House of Figaro" is that he also brought happiness to others, which is the most comfortable Mozart I have ever visited, especially the night lights make everything warmer and more comfortable, and the Mozart chocolate sugar balls bought from here must be differently sweet.
Once the good mood came out of Church Lane and saw the dark St. Stephen's Basilica, it became extremely heavy. Mozart's wedding to Constanta was held here, and his extremely simple funeral was hastily completed in the Chapel of the Cross on the other side of Church Lane, on a snowy afternoon, and many people even stood in the snow because of the small space inside the chapel. There is now a statue of Mozart near the chapel, and to this day he has not been able to enter the interior of the cathedral.
St. Marxer Friedhof in Leberstraße, 3rd arrondissement, is closer to the city than the Central Cemetery, but in Mozart's time it was a far-flung suburb. From the crowded Central Cemetery here, there is a strong contrast in atmosphere. The door of the cemetery is small and simple, it is in my eyes a cemetery closest to heaven, it is not large, there are few people, the autumn yellow leaves lay a thick layer on the ground, the beauty of its scenery, the air is refreshing and quiet, most of the tombstones are simple and elegant, so that I have lingered here again and again, and I can't bear to leave.
The supposed tomb of Mozart appears a bit lonely, with white headstones and cherub statues that seem to be out of tune with the style of the cemetery as a whole, especially the surrounding evergreen trees that isolate it from its surroundings. Even so, in the face of the weeping angel and the long candle in front of the tombstone, our hearts are still full of sorrow for the early death of the genius.
Mozart's crowned tomb in the Central Cemetery
Mozart's Tomb at St. Marks' Cemetery
Weeping angels
Uncertainty about Mozart's tomb has long been accompanied by legends that mozart was so poor at the time of his death that he could only be hastily buried in a grave along with several other corpses, making it impossible to confirm the exact location of his burial. The historical conclusion is that the radical reform decree of Joseph II not only strengthened the hierarchy, requiring that civilians could only be buried in civilian cemeteries outside the city, and the burial ceremony was simple, the corpses were not coffins, but wrapped in linen and sprinkled with quicklime, and after seven years, the bones were selected and buried separately, and the pit needed to be used again by new corpses. Not only Mozart, but most of his contemporaries, are also uncertain about their burial place in the st. Max's cemetery.
Nevertheless, we should lament the misfortune of Mozart's fate, because shortly before his burial, the newly enthroned Leopold II had already announced the repeal of the decree, and I wondered why Van Schwaidon, who had helped Zhang Luo's funeral, had watched Mozart's affairs be arranged according to the old decree.
The magic flute sculpture at the main entrance of the Vienna Theater
However, recent research suggests that Mozart's body was thrown into mass graves in order to eliminate evidence that he was poisoned, and that his executioner was also from the authorities. On December 5, 2006, on Mozart's last anniversary, the Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore published the famous scientist Mr. Xu Jinghua's novel "Mozart's Love and Death", which made a thought-provoking and interesting inference of the mystery of Mozart's death, which is worth reading.
The statue of Mozart in the palace garden is recognized as the best statue of Mozart
Two hundred years after his death, Mozart is not alone in the St. Marks Cemetery, not only by Joseph, the mother and brother of Johann Strauss jr., but also by Diabelli, the sheet music publisher for whom Beethoven had composed the Diabelli Variations, and by his beloved daughter, Mozart's most loyal girlfriend in the last years of his life, Anna Gottrib, who died in 1856 (exactly the centenary of Mozart's birth). Anna is a beautiful and intelligent soprano, and Mozart's Parina song in The Magic Flute is tailor-made for her. Mozart's death devastated Anna and she never sang the role of Paminea again. When she was seventeen years old, Mozart brought her a fan from Frankfurt, which she regarded as her most precious treasure for the rest of her life, and held it in her hands on her deathbed and buried it with her in her will. Standing in front of Anna's tombstone, my tears finally flowed uncontrollably, and I hoped that these were tears of relief for Mozart.