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'At that there was a peal of laughter behind me, clear and chilling from a world beyond unknown to men, a world engendered of pain, purged and divine humour. I turned around, frozen through and blessed with this laughter, and along came Mozart...'
Who wrote these words? - A world-famous author, Hermann Hesse, in a frequently translated work popularly revered as a cult-book. Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf himself, describes his visionary encounter with Mozart.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is omnipresent – Amadeus in us, in every opera-house, in every concert-hall, on every record-player, in novels and plays and films. And above all – in Salzburg. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was twenty-five when he summoned up the strength to break with his father, to break with the prince-archbishop, to break with his own roots. Mozart had spent a good part of these twenty-five years away from Salzburg. Even so, he had spent a far greater part of this time neither travelling, nor in London nor in Vienna, but in the city of his birth – in Salzburg.
And a walk through the old part of Salzburg leads us inevitably in his footsteps – to the houses where his family lived, to his friends, to the guest-houses, to the grave-yards. A walk of this kind becomes our own visionary encounter with Mozart, as our imagination explores the Salzburg that he also knew.
It was a now famous row that put an end to the interest of Salzburg’s prince-archbishops in music – Mozart and Count Colloredo, the last of a long line of secular-ecclesiastical princes, parted on bad terms.
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