Mozart playing the piano with his mother
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