Sorting Through Hype of Vienna’s Mozart Year

At the Cafe Mozart, just behind Vienna’s splendid opera house, the new Japanese owners are offering something called the Mozart Dish, a snack with bits of roast beef, shrimp, ham, smoked salmon, trout, stuffed egg and a lump of cocktail sauce. This dish will cost you $15. It is, in the estimation of Peter Weiser, the director of Vienna’s Mozart anniversary year, “terrible.”

“You will never eat Mozart again,” he promises.

Fine, but maybe you’d like to eat on Mozart. The city’s Kunsthaus gift shop offers Mozart porcelain plates. Or you can ski Mozart, thanks to the sharpy who slapped the composer’s image on some skis. Throw Mozart--there’s a Frisbee called “Wolferl.” Smell Mozart--there are actually competing Mozart perfumes.

There are Mozartburgers (at McDonald’s, of course), Mozart scarves, Mozart playing cards, Mozart mayonnaise, masks, miniatures, mints and millions of Mozart marzipan candies called Mozartkugeln, which were actually eaten during the composer’s lifetime, making them, the experts say, the only remotely authentic produce in the whole cavalcade of commerce.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died 200 years ago this Dec. 5. As a result, perfectly well-behaved and historically minded cities such as Vienna, Salzburg and dozens of other burgs in Austria and Germany have gone a bit batty this year, offering countless concerts, exhibits of varying value and an endless array of products, all designed to spread the gospel of Amadeus and make more money than Mozart ever conceived of.

The complete works of Mozart are available on compact disc for the first time--675 works on 180 CDs, 210 hours of listening for a mere $2,000, and Philips already has sold more than 20,000 sets, according to project manager Stef Collignon.

Mozart himself was an avowed fan of excess, a fact that salesmen and marketers have taken to heart this year. But the Vienna celebration has tried to keep the music--unadulterated, untainted by sponsors and hucksters--on the main stage of the yearlong festival.

Revolted by the example of France’s celebration two years ago of the anniversary of its revolution, Weiser, appointed by Vienna’s mayor to create a proper bicentenary, has spent much of the past months saying no.

No to politicians who wanted Vienna’s gala concerts to be little more than campaign events.

No to a chamber-pot company that wanted to offer a product with a portrait of Mozart’s rival composer, Salieri (at least according to the grand myth promulgated by the movie “Amadeus”), painted on the bottom. And no to Mozartland, a Disney-like theme park that would have been built in the center of Vienna, where actors would have been hired to be beggars and strippers, to carry tourists around in hand-held sedans.

“Some of the best hotels in the city wanted me to create a Mozart menu, but you can’t,” Weiser says. “He liked capon--a castrated rooster, which is illegal in Austria. And he liked a fish called hausen, which is like a sturgeon, but there’s a dam on the river now that prevents this fish from coming to Vienna anymore, so you can’t have that either.

“But the hotels said, ‘No, you don’t understand, we don’t have to sell Mozart’s favorite foods, we just want a menu to American and Japanese tastes that Mozart might have eaten.’ ”

Weiser leaned back in his chair and stared at a visitor. “Well,” he says, “I can replace Leonard Bernstein with George Solti, but I cannot make a replacement for Mozart’s capon. I said no.”

On that note, Weiser turned his attention to music, which is, all hype aside, the heart of Vienna’s celebration. This summer, every evening, Vienna will offer audiences of 5,000 free showings of notable film and television productions of Mozart operas on a giant screen in front of the city hall. There’s Mozart in the churches, a citywide program in which the composer’s many masses are being performed not as concert pieces but in the religious setting for which they were intended. You can hear Mozart in palaces (the Palais Auersperg offers trio concerts with Jause, the afternoon coffee and cake that contributes mightily to the Viennese’s bulk).

And you can hear the music in museums, although the selections that accompany Vienna’s main Mozart exhibition, “Magical Sounds,” at the Kuenstlerhaus, bleed from one room to the next and lurch uncomfortably from one piece to another.

The exhibit itself is not so much about Mozart as about his times, a reflection both of Weiser’s intention to use the celebration to teach about Viennese history and of the fact that there simply aren’t many Mozart artifacts around. That makes for a rather dull display, and the tourist guides that warn of a “crush” of visitors at the museum are only wishful thinking--the place is always empty. Still, from household objects of medical tools to pool tables and theatrical costumes, the exhibit does present a complete view of Mozart’s world for the serious history buff.

There are surprisingly few traces of Mozart in a city where he spent chunks of 29 years living in 20 houses. Some of those structures still stand, and one, known as the Mozart House on Schulerstrasse, provides a good feel for 18th-Century Vienna. Mozart aside, Vienna is one of the easiest places in Europe in which to vanish into another time, wandering the narrow back alleys and ducking into any number of 17th- and 18th-Century churches.

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, where Wolfgang married Constanze, is breathtaking, and the perfect place to hear the Requiem, which will be performed there by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in December to bring the Mozart year to a magnificent close.

The Mozart history presented in this year of celebration is not designed to display a new version of the man, or even to correct the false impressions of him that have filled the popular mind.

“I’m not against myths,” Weiser says. “Myths happened to personalities. You can’t kill them. Try to convince the world that Richard III was no hunchback and was an intelligent man. You can’t, because you are not as smart as Shakespeare.

“The film ‘Amadeus’ created a legend one should not destroy. Of course, it’s silly to think that Mozart died dictating the end of the Requiem to Salieri. It’s rubbish. But Mozart would have wanted to die that way. Why destory it?”

A more academic exhibit at the National Library is designed to set the record straight on Mozart’s life, showing through financial records that the composer was hardly the struggling pauper many biographers have idealized.

But the bulk of the Mozart bash is meant instead to boost Vienna, the music and the myth of the child genius whose every bit of creation is being shoveled before the worldwide public in concerts (New York’s Lincoln Center is spending 19 months running through the complete works) and on recordings.

Organizers of Vienna’s celebration are very big on a quote someone dug up in which the composer, in a letter to his father, said, “Vienna is the best place in all the world for my metier.”

These days, the Viennese actually prefer Beethoven and Strauss, although the city’s concert halls are dutifully presenting great globs of Mozart this year.

Of course, this game of claiming a piece of Mozart’s greatness can be played by any number of cities in this part of the world, and many of them are doing just that, laying on musical festivals and latching onto some shred of history that seems to justify their connection to Wolfgang.

Salzburg, the composer’s birthplace, does the most honest job of it. Even though Mozart despised the place, Salzburg is richly packed with relics such as the boy’s child-sized violin and a lock of his hair.

There’s even a town in Germany, Augsburg, that has trotted out a fellow named Wolfgang Mozart, who is supposedly the composer’s only living direct descendant. This Mozart is 27, builds scaffolds for a living, has curly red hair and spent his childhood being teased by schoolmates who heard his name and said, “Yeah, and I’m Johann Sebastian Bach, ha, ha.” The modern Mozart has never heard a Mozart opera, owns only one symphony recording, which he doesn’t particularly like, and prefers the pop song “Rock Me, Amadeus.”

All this mania is, of course, relatively new to the composer, and much of it traces to the Hollywood version of his life peddled by Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” an adoringly mischievous characterization of Mozart as an impossible, irresponsible, irrevelant imp. Mozart was famous in his own time, but he won decidedly mixed reviews, and Emperor Joseph II delivered the ultimate putdown when he dismissed one of the young man’s works by saying, “Too many notes, my dear Mozart.”

It is only in this century that Mozart has achieved a place in the pantheon of musical history, and now comes a year of commemoration that conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt complains is “squashing poor Mozart like a steamroller.” But organizers of the Vienna events say no damage is being done; rather, Mozart is being introduced to a new generation of listeners.

Mozart revisionism has been all the rage in the music world in recent years, as proponents of the original instruments movement applied their new orthodoxy to his works. In Vienna, where Mozart’s face now adorns the 5,000 schilling note (about $500), there is no attempt this year to put a new spin on Mozart’s works. If there is any trend in the concert programs that fill the city’s cultural calendar, it is the reverse: a return to the serene, somewhat syrupy interpretation that Vienna orchestras long have preferred for Mozart--and just about every other composer for that matter.

All this Mozart is expected to bring more visitors to Vienna than any previous event. But the Gulf War put a major crimp in the beginning of the celebration, as Americans and Japanese tourists led the wave of cancellations.

But bookings are coming back strong, tourism officials say.

You can find Mozart quotations to back up any excess you wish to justify. After all, this is the bawdy fellow who packed his letters with crude descriptions of bodily functions and loved to talk dirty, especially when it was most likely to offend some stuffy official.

That rough side of Mozart is easily found in his letters, but the more casual observer can get a sense of it from the excesses of this year’s celebration--crass marketing and silly product lines that probably would have appealed to the composer’s cynical side.

And for those who get no joy from the camp of modern excess, Vienna has laid on enough performances to satiate any listener.

Over the course of the year, many of the world’s top conductors will be part of the Vienna Mozart celebration, including Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado, Ricardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and George Solti.

Weiser should be proud of the program he has arranged. Instead, he is near tears as he runs through the list. “The Mozart year is overshadowed by the death of the only man who could have told us something new about Mozart,” the organizer says. “Leonard Bernstein was at my house and he sang from ‘Figaro’ to show me how Mozart wrote as manly a music as Bach. He shouted at me, ‘Mozart was a man.’ He could have taught that to all of us.”

GUIDEBOOK: Mozart Events Worthy of Note

Vienna’s yearlong celebration of Mozart includes:

Exhibits:

--”Magic Sounds,” main historical tribute, Kuenstlerhaus, until Sept. 15.

--”Requiem,” Austrian National Library, Thursday through Dec. 5

--”The Sound of Mozart,” display of original instruments, scores and recordings, with occasional concerts, Hofburg. Daily except Tuesdays, through Oct. 27.

--”Mozart 1791-1991,” Musikverein, daily except Sundays, Nov. 19-Jan. 4.

Concerts:

--Mozart Festival, Musikverein, all year, with a lineup of top international conductors and soloists.

--St. Michael’s Church, 10 a.m. masses on Sundays all year.

--Palais Auersperg, Mozart trios with Viennese coffee and cake, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 4:30 p.m., all year.

--Vienna Festival, Konzerthaus, international music festival with the theme “Mozart and Modernism,” through June 17.

--Summer of Music, in the courtyard of City Hall and various palaces, with free showings of filmed operas and symphonic works as well as concerts. June 26-Sept. 2.

--Mozart Festival, Konzerthaus, Nov. 24-Dec. 20.

--The Requiem, Vienna Philharmonic, led by Georg Solti, at St. Stephan’s Cathedral, Dec. 5.

Opera:

--Volksoper, Thursdays, five Mozart operas in German, all year.

--Vienna State Opera, two Mozart seasons: through June 8, Sept. 1 to year’s end.

--Theater an der Wien, Claudio Abbado conducting “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” through June 6.

For more information: Contact the Austrian National Tourist Office, 11601 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 2480, Los Angeles 90025, (213) 477-3332.