Vienna was for about two centuries the center of the composers of classical music. At the peak you had the geniuses of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven who ruled over the music scores in the years around 1800.
The Austrian capital continued to be at the core of all new musical development during the 19th century. On the streets you would have met Bruckner, Brahms, Schubert, Mahler and many, many more. The reign lasted up and until the Wiener avant-garde around year 1900 which, with Arnold Schönberg as its guru, broke with the basic structure of classical music.
Of all these towering giants, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is perhaps the most beloved.
In the director Jean-Luc Godard’s film from 1967, ‘Weekend’, a concert pianist plays pieces of work by Mozart on a grand piano outside a barn – as one does – and subsequently tells the audience of farmers that children loves to play Mozart – and that the professional musicians fear the most.
You can find this slightly surreal movie scene here ↗.
For our Mozart evening at the Mozarthaus, we have had the good luck to have found a fearless concert pianist, the brilliant Richard Ilich Tauber. He will play Mozart’s works that were composed at this very address.