This week has been pretty eventful. We began making arrangements for our Austrian tour and have secured the dates for our trip. Now the hunt for airfare begins! It is pretty amazing the number of sites available to reserve airline tickets. You can find 15 different sites, all with the same exact flight numbers and airlines with 15 different prices! It seems like having the internet sites should make this easier, not more complicated!
The other big event this week was getting the first of four books that we will be reading before we travel. The books range from biographies of Mozart to in depth analysis of Mahler symphonies, and a history of the Habsburg empire.
I've started reading the first of two biographies on Mozart. This one,
Mozart; a Life, by Maynard Solomon, is a 519 page account. I've found it interesting in the first two chapters that his father was a bit of a hypocrite. I've always known that his father played an important role in the nurturing of Mozart's talent and that he didn't allow Wolfgang to travel alone...ever...even when he was in his twenties! Talk about a helicopter parent! Leopold held his son to the strictest musical and morale standards, and yet when Leopold was young he was kicked out of school and lied to the officials in his hometown, Augsburg, in an attempt to maintain his citizenship. It seems to be a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do"!
I'm interested to find out more about Mozart's defection from his hometown of Salzburg. Having traveled to Salzburg once, I know that Mozart is an important part of the economy. However, it seems that it was years after his death before the town embraced him or his family. I wonder if the change was due to a smart business-minded official who saw the tourist potential or if they realized the historic importance Mozart and had a desire to share his hometown with the world? I'd like to think it is the latter, but I have a feeling it wasn't!
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