MUSICAL GENIUS

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20995, 23 December 1939, Page 17 (Supplement)

MUSICAL GENIUS

DEATH IN OBSCURITY LIFE OF WOLFGANG MOZART To a Viennese cemetery, in a blinding snowstorm, a third class funeral wended its way, says Anna Kolb in “Mozart.” It stopped. The few mourners deserted. Burial was completed by the undertaker’s employees. That was the tribute the world paid to one of its men of genius— Wolfgang Mozart. Today his name and his music are famous in every civilised country. Yet is his grave unknown, nor is there authentic knowledge of* his lineaments. At 35 he entered what Goethe has called the “tomb’s darkness.”

His parents had seven children, who were reared on water instead of milk, and two survived, Wolfgang being the youngest. His father was a musician of splendid parts, but in those days the arts were considered little better than the status of a butler.

European nobles maintained small orchestras or bands, and Mozart pere served in them until Wolfgang at four years of age composed music which proved him a prodigy. Thereafter he devoted his life to his son, whose contemporaries agree that he had an exceptionally large, beetling head, prominent, bulging eyes, and a slender- body of small stature. A Merry Little Soul He was a merry little soul with a genuine sense of humour which a orutal world slowly blunted, even though he was arrogayit and felt removed from the milling multitude. With his father as cicerone, he travelled up and down Europe playing before kings and princes ana great personages, yet his path always turned off before the point of happiness was reached, leading instead of over laughing slopes over the mountain of disappointment.