Any ideas what Mozart's favorite meal was?
Mozart was wined and dined by royalty, yet in his extensive correspondences with family and friends, he rarely commented on the food he was served. So just what did he like to eat? Bratwurst Semmel? Duck with red cabbage? Liver dumplings with sauerkraut? Spaghetti Bolognese?
Find out the answer by joining me for lunch in a traditional Austrian Wirtshaus where we will be served exactly what Mozart would have ordered!
Mozart: The room where it happened.
Mozart was born in the family bedroom on January 27, 1756. He was small and weak as an infant, and his parents worried he wouldn't survive. Wolfgang was the last of seven children for his parents, but only he and his older sister, Nannerl, survived infancy. His father, Leopold, said he was "the miracle which God let be born in Salzburg."
The Mozart family lived on the third floor of the "Hagenauer Haus" in the center of Salzburg. The house was owned by Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, who was a wealthy spice merchant and would become a strong supporter and financial backer of the Mozart family. The building opened into a street fish market.
The Mozart family lived in this modest, four-room apartment until Wolfgang was 17. It was in the music room where a nearly five-year-old Wolfgang shocked the family when, without any music lessons, he played a piece on the keyboard that his sister had been practicing for weeks. Soon after, he started composing pieces for the keyboard.
Today, Mozart's childhood home is one of the most visited museums in Salzburg. In this episode, I invite you to join me on a visit to Mozart's Geburtshaus for a tourist-free walk through the house where we get to discover many things about his early years.
Mozart played the organ. Who knew?
Mozart played the harpsichord, the clavichord, the fortepiano, the violin, the viola and the …organ? Indeed he did. Mozart, in fact, loved the organ. But much of his organ music was improvised at Mass, and so it was never written down and thus didn’t survive.
Mozart spent his final years in Salzburg as the court organist to the Archbishop Collorado, which meant that he was the organist at church every week.
The Mozarts were devout Catholics and the church they attended was none other than the famous Salzburg Cathedral, or Salzburger Dom. The church was, and remains, the center of ecclesiastic life in Salzburg. It’s a beautiful, 17th-century, Baroque-style church with five organs.
In this introductory episode of Mozart Snapshots, I invite you to join me on a visit to the Salzburger Dom where we will get an exclusive tour of the organ Mozart played and speak with the current organist of the cathedral.
