My Lifetime Dream of Walking in the Footsteps of Mozart and Beethoven

The excitement, the thrill, the feeling in the core of my being when I stood in the room where Mozart was born, then in the room where Beethoven wrote the heartfelt Heiligenstadt Document, will stay with me forever.

My trip to Salzburg, Vienna and Prague during the summer of 2006 was a pilgrimage of love and respect. The more my life has been filled with the music of these two great masters, the more I have longed to see where they lived and worked, where they created their glorious music that has inspired and sustained millions of people for two hundred and fifty years and gives no sign of waning.

Over the course of the two weeks I journeyed in the company of my dear friends and colleagues, Rosemarie and Jean Blanc. We were excited to visit the Mozart Haus, where Amadeus entered the world. In that ancient house there were ceramic stoves the size of an old-fashioned wood stove, only prettier and decorated with flowery designs. There were no openings in the part of the stove that was in the room. In a corridor meant for the servants, each of the stoves had a doorway for removing the wood ash and stoking with fresh wood for burning. Unlike North American fireplaces or woodstoves, no dirty ashes could enter the living rooms to soil the pretty silk clothing so loved in Mozart’s time.

We saw the tiny violin that Mozart played when he was four years old as well as the piano that travelled with Mozart on his journeys. We stood in the gorgeous yellow room in Schonbrunn castle where the little Mozart climbed into the lap of the Empress Maria-Theresa, covered her face with kisses, and told her that he would marry her when he grew up. Fickle woman, when Mozart was grown and in need of a secure post, she wrote a letter trashing him to the prospective employer, saying that he wasn’t so wonderful and besides, he had a large and hungry family!

I sat in the cathedral where Mozart was baptized and heard the massive organ that he played occasionally. The sound filled the huge space and resonated in every cell of my body.

The Vienna opera house, which performs a different opera each day of the week, ten months a year, is vast and gorgeous yet somehow welcoming and people-friendly. The luxury of the building enhances one’s sense of how wonderful it is to be human, to know, to see, to hear the magnificence that our fellows are capable of creating and sharing. Sitting in the Emperor’s box, at the end of the comprehensive and informative tour, I suddenly knew just how I was meant to live! I love to imagine what it must have been like to sit in those luxurious, perfectly-placed seats, hearing Mozart’s glorious operas and watching him conduct in the pit!

In Heiligenstadt, now a suburb of Vienna, we visited the two medium-sized rooms in a pretty but not luxurious house where Beethoven wrote the document, now known as the Heilgenstadt Testament, in which he speaks for the first time about his hearing affliction to his brother Carl. We have had such a distorted picture or Beethoven as being uncouth, uncultured and socially unacceptable when in fact he was tortured by not being able to hear and afraid of being ostracized because he was deaf. It was terrible for him to be in society, incapable of hearing what was being said and equally incapable of telling anyone why. To hear him express his longing to be loved and accepted is anguishing. To stand in the rooms where he wrote this agonizing confession made me feel conscious of the deep expression of emotions that lives in every note of every piece of music he composed.

My feelings of awe and privilege have caused me to listen with greater joy and keenness to experience more fully the progression of every sound, knowing that each time I hear a piece again, I have the possibility of resonating more deeply with the power and beauty of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music.