Scenic reading, with musical accompaniment
Mozart and his mother
| 26 July 2006 |
8 p.m. |
Café Maislinger |
Bad Goisern |
By
Helmut Korherr |
Featuring
Gabriele Schuchter and
Christoph von Friedl
|
Mozart and his mother
An infinite amount has been written about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a considerable amount has been written about those around him. However, relatively little is known about the mother of the genius. The Austrian author Helmut Korherr is now trying to close this gap in the form of “Mozart and his mother”. Owing to the scarcity of the original documentation relating to the mother’s identity (née Anna Maria Walburga Pertl), this undertaking was extremely difficult.
However, the author has had a great deal of experience in research, since he has already successfully written several literary biographies. “Drei literarische Frauenbilder” was published by Roetzer in 2002, for example. This book was concerned with the lives of George Sand, Bertha von Suttner and Eleonora Duse.
His experiences in unearthing historic facts therefore came in useful for the author in the “Mozart and his mother” project.
The plot of
“Mozart and his mother”
The basic setting of the plot is Mozart’s trip to Germany and France, which he had to undertake for the first time without his father Leopold in 1777: his father had to stay in Salzburg at the behest of the Archbishop Colloredo.
As a matter of necessity, his mother accompanied the 21-year old. It was her duty to ensure that Wolfgang didn’t get up to too much mischief, and that he pursued his career in earnest. She didn’t quite manage this. The young Mozart kept on falling madly in love, and his actions were, to some extent, unpredictable. Following the unsuccessful search for a suitable position at a royal German court, Wolfgang went to Paris to try his luck. His father suffered greatly from only being able to offer instructions and advice in writing. Wolfgang spent a lot of time out and about in the French capital: his mother hence frequently felt lonely, and expresses her psychological state in a despairing monologue.
She eventually died in Paris in 1778 as the result of a cold she had caught on an icy coach ride. Wolfgang was despondent, yet this tragedy matured him.
