Mozart's Bicentennial Jubilee in Salzburg — Amid His Works and His People!

We mentioned in the previous issue the news of the return of Mrs. Heneni Tarcha, president of the Lebanese Women's League and Responsible Director of this magazine, from a journey to Austria on the occasion of the bicentennial jubilee of the birth of the great composer Mozart.

We are pleased to record below the most striking of Mrs. Tarcha's impressions of this great artistic festival:

... No sooner had we set down our baggage in Salzburg than we saw for ourselves, at close range, the great effort in which government and popular circles had joined so that Mozart might live again before the eyes and in the minds of the millions of tourists and visitors streaming to his birthplace, on the occasion of the passing of two hundred years since his birth...

Salzburg is Mozart!

I do not exaggerate if I say that "Salzburg" is "Mozart," and there is no way Mozart's name can leave your mind for a single moment as long as you are in this city. His splendid statues stand in every square and at every turning.

Here is Mozart the child composer, five years old, playing before the public... There is Mozart the youth, playing at court before the Queen; and over there Mozart the young man, conductor of the orchestra and composer of the immortal pieces.

Here is the Mozart museum, containing all his compositions and his artistic and musical relics; and here is his mother's house, where he composed his earliest pieces and where the gifts of his genius unfolded at the hands of his mother — his first teacher... Here everything remains as it was two hundred years ago; the years have added to it nothing but dignity and gravity. And there is Mozart's house, where he married and lived after his mother's death; in this house there is a finely wrought "maquette" of every opera Mozart composed — together with his bedrooms and reception rooms — all preserved in their original state. The Second World War had taken its toll of the house and left it half in ruins, but the zeal of the Austrians, and of the people of Salzburg in particular, restored the house, by skillful repair, to its first condition, as though no harm had ever touched it...

Their pride in Mozart: In Salzburg, Mozart fills every eye and every heart. Wherever we turned, his name met us: here the Mozart park, here the Mozart school, this the Mozart square, and that the Mozart block, and so on... The people there are proud of this composer's genius to the farthest limits of pride, and they work successfully to carry the echo of his name to every corner of the world.

I was particularly moved by one scene I saw in Salzburg. It was eleven o'clock in the day and the rain was pouring down in torrents, and there were the people stopping and gathering before an enormous church, heedless of the passing of time and of the pouring rain, to listen in reverence to the 32 bells ringing out, in measured order, a certain "melody" of Mozart's! I understood afterward that this performance is repeated three times a day: at eight and eleven in the morning and at six in the evening. To this degree and beyond has gone their esteem and their homage for this matchless composer whom their soil brought forth.

Sights and impressions: I was astonished by the enchanting natural scenery in Mozart's homeland. Around Salzburg lie four lakes ringed by high green mountains, until the very waters, from the reflection of the dense forests, become green rather than blue!

I admired beyond measure the perfect cleanliness everywhere, and the kindliness of the people and their exquisite good manners; but I could not miss, in their faces, the marks of strain and of suppressed pain that the recent wars had caused them...

We passed many women toiling at plowing the land — men's work, with us — and the signs of fatigue showed on their faces... I said to myself: the men must surely be taken up with work of greater weight...

Poor Gibran! Faced with the greatness of what I saw, I could not help remembering Gibran, our own "great one," and the vast gulf between the people of Salzburg and the people of Bsharri in their esteem for their men of genius... And my heart was wrung with envy as I compared the two situations at the present hour... especially after I had called back to mind the state of the Gibran museum in Bsharri today, and — more important than this — the "awareness" which Mozart's countrymen feel and act upon, and which "does not exist" in Gibran's birthplace, least of all in the "committee for the perpetuation of his memory," which pursues every end but this very one...

Poor Gibran! Why should he not have loyal countrymen who would lay their hands on the splendid stream of revenue that flows into Bsharri every year from the sale of his books, and direct it toward honoring his memory in truth, and spend it along the path on which it ought to be spent — to make this great Lebanese artist and poet live, and to set him in the lofty station in which he ought to be set?

And if the Gibran committee, and behind it the people of Bsharri, are of the artistic obtuseness we know, then why does not the Commission of Tourism and Summering, for instance, hasten to save the situation?!

This is what haunted my mind on my return from Salzburg, and I wished in my turn to whisper it to the readers — in the hope that I may find among them someone whose enthusiasm will drive him to sincere, positive action...