Oliver scouted out all the places we needed to visit to find out about Mozart as we walked around the city and then we had a great “day of Mozart” where we visited all the places Oliver wanted to go.
Our first stop was the Mozart Wohnhaus, the house Mozart grew up in. Just in front of it is a beautiful garden full of magnolia trees. They were all in full bloom when we visited and it was such a beautiful place to walk around!
There was a beautiful room full of instruments that belonged to Mozart. This was my favorite room. The audio guide played musical pieces that had been played on each instrument. It was interesting because many of the instruments are ones that we are not familiar with today. The harpsicords and also the pianos have a different sound than the pianos we play today.
There were several rooms full of letters that had been written among the Mozart family that gave a glimpse into their lives and relationships. I was mostly struck by the fact that their family seemed to be very close and to genuinely like each other. Many of the other composers we studied did not seem to have very happy family relationships. They also showed that Mozart did have a very lively sense of humor – Chris took a picture of a “self portrait” Mozart drew of himself in a letter to his wife. Â There was also a room with many different paintings and portraits of Mozart and an area where you could check out your height compared to Mozart. He was a sickly child and had health problems throughout his life, so he was not very tall! Elora is almost as tall as he was! There are not a lot of pictures because you can’t take pictures in any of the Mozart museums. I don’t love that, we have a lot of nice pictures from museums of every other composer we have visited, but they are much more strict in all the Mozart museums.
Next we went to the Mozart Geburtshaus – the home where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. This apartment was quite small with only one bedroom. There was Mozart’s violin from childhood! This was very fun to see and was on display in the room where he was actually born. Oliver came over to us jumping excitedly, saying, “Mozart was born here! Mozart was born here!” It was fun to see his excitement. Elora liked seeing the famous paintings of Mozart in person, and also we learned about Mozart’s son who was also a composer. Salieri taught him for awhile and said he was very talented and predicted he would surpass the fame of his father. He mostly composed for the piano. It was also interesting to read about how Mozart’s wife, Constanze, spent many years promoting Mozart’s work and her second husband wrote a biography about Wolfgang. Elora ended all the tours wondering why no one has really heard of Nannerl, Mozart’s sister, considering she was also very talented. She thought it was very sad that she didn’t get to tour with Wolfgang when she was older.
Oliver is really excited about this picture, as these are his favorite brand of Mozart Kugeln. The sale of them also contributes to the support of all the Mozart museums in Salzburg. Salzburg is a fun place to walk around if you love Mozart. There are statues, streets, universities, candies and more named after him. Oliver says even the airport is named after him. It is so amazing to walk where he did and realize that it may not have looked that different back then.
We went to a really tasty cafe in a small alley called Goldgasse. It was a nice quiet spot to eat outside and it was nice to enjoy a really good meal while sitting outside where the kids could talk and color without disturbing anyone. We introducted the kids to Salzburger Nockerl, a yummy dessert that takes a really long time to make, but is worth the wait. It comes with vanilla ice cream and raspberry cream. The kids had fun drawing puppets on their napkins and doing crossword puzzles the waiter brought them while we waited for our yummy meal.
We found a fun park called “Die Zauberflote Spielplatz” (The Magic Flute Playground). It is right by the Mirabell gardens and has some really fun bells you can jump on, great slides, and beautiful magnolia trees.
There is a HUGE pyramid with a slide coming down. The slide is really long and super fast. The kids loved it (except Marion who went down once, flew off the end, and decided not to try it again). We came back to this park multiple times during our trip and had so much fun here.
