Name: Mozart in Vienna - Documentary about Mozart's life (with English subtitles)
Uploaded: 2017-05-08T23:07:50.000Z
Duration: 58 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Just the sounds that this person´s heard his whole life, just when his own name is called or when he put his name up – it´s so powerful.

Say what you like: you could spend 20 years studying Mozart and poring over his scores,

but achieving an emotional grasp of a genius of this magnitude is almost impossible.

There’s no point in approaching him in the belief that at some stage you’ll understand what made him tick –

he has to be regarded as an enormous secret which gets deeper and deeper.

I believe that Mozart addresses us directly and that we can see this message and reinterpret it again and again.

This keeps boredom at bay, even if I’m producing Magic Flute for the seventh time in the same year.

I can not write poetically, I am not a poet...I am not a painter, I cannot express my convictions and thoughts through pointing and mime;

I am not a dancer, I can do it however through sounds; I am a musician.

On March 16th, 1781 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrives in Vienna. He wants to turn his back on his home town of Salzburg and try his luck here in the big city.

He thought no matter what is going on here, I know have the chance to brake out and be my own person,

that´s irresistible for a hard headed person like Mozart who above all is perfectly aware that there is nobody on the planet with his abilities.

His father is against this. He is afraid that Mozart would strain himself. And he also does not want to remain alone in Salzburg.

Still Mozart does not give up: “Mon très cher Père, I assure you that this is a marvellous place – and for my profession the best place in the world and I am happy to be here.”

Mozart knows Vienna from his time as a child prodigy  – but that was the Vienna of Empress Theresia.

Meanwhile much has changed. Joseph II has taken over the regency.

Two hundred thousand people live here in five thousand and five hundred buildings, roughly a quarter of which in the inner district.

People live crammed together, with nearly fifty to each house.

Joseph II wants to be a people’s emperor. He has done away with the fawning courtiers  – there are hardly any official ceremonials.

The Emperor prefers to visit the palaces to enjoy himself.  He mostly wears simple clothing – and even walks among the general population.

The city changes her face almost daily – the zeitgeist quickens the pace of life.

By that time Vienna already had a very prominent music scene, and actively playing and supporting music were something of a status symbol for the highly aristocratic population.

Music was a must, rather like golf is today. It was important to play music and keep abreast with developments.

In this respect Vienna was a marvellous place for not just Mozart but also other artists and intellectuals.

Vienna was large enough to allow him to spread his wings in all directions. I really don’t think this would have been possible in Salzburg.

Musically, Vienna is firmly in the hands of Joseph Haydn, who is to become Mozart’s Friend, the court composer Christoph Willibald Gluck,

whose position Mozart later inherited, and the Italian Antonio Salieri, the court conductor, whose position Mozart would have very much liked to inherit.

Mozart enjoys the flair of the world city Vienna to the fullest. In the larger squares and on the Moat,

crowded huts and stalls abound where soft drinks, ice cream, almond milk, and sweets are on offer.

Vienna is a city in transformation, moulded by the Emperor’s reform activities. He has abolished censorship.

The paper press flourishes. Politics and Vienna excesses are openly discussed. Joseph II want a modern city. “Enlightenment from above”.

The Emperor opens up the society, but also imposes his reforms with relentless severity with the aid of police informers.

With his tolerance edicts he integrates the Jews into the economy and the city-life.

It was the time when the individual began to develop as an individualist,

when the position of subjectivity prepared by the Enlightenment was suddenly expressed in a variety of individualistic concepts, so to speak.

The individual is something new.  Salons spring up everywhere, people speak with each other.

Individuals rather than types. A new principal, which Mozart uses in his singspiel “The Abduction from the Seraglio”. Joseph II had commissioned it as a German-language national singspiel.

Mozart masterfully fulfils the expectations with “Abduction”:  adventure, exotica, and the exciting image of a Turkish harem.

Two European women are abducted and brought to the house of Bassa Selim. Count Belmonte and his servant want to rescue them.

In a happy ending the wise Bassa Selim lets the prisoners go.

The whole Turkish frame of mind as such was very present in Vienna, for there was an extraordinarily large number of Turks out and about in the city.

Vienna was a place where above all people from South-eastern Europe were to be seen on the streets.

Mozart allows himself to be inspired from the look of these oriental streets.

He likes Johann Gottlieb Stephanie’s textbook straight off.  Indeed Mozart does not only want to deliver the music – he intervenes himself in the libretto.

“In an opera poetry must necessarily be the obedient daughter of music.

– why then are Italian comic operas beloved everywhere – with all the wretchedness as far as the book is concerned!

It is best then, when a good composer who understands the theatre and is able to offer something,

and a clever poet come together as a true Phoenix – then may one also not fear the applause of the ignorant.”

Mozart’s ideas of what a libretto should be like were related to the fact that he always thought in dramatic forms.

Even Mozart’s instrumental music is always a type of music in which scenic events spring to mind.

After the premiere the Emperor calls Mozart to his side: “Too beautiful for our ears, and far too many notes, Herr Mozart”

– quick-witted, Mozart replies: “Just as many notes as required.”

In the 1780s, Mozart had to take criticism – sometimes considerable criticism – in various areas.

As far as opera was concerned, he was repeatedly accused of making the orchestral part too heavy, too swollen, too ponderous, and writing too many notes....

“Vienna, December 15th, 1781  Mon très cher père,

my ambition is in the meantime to have a little bit of security here – then with the help of the uncertain one can live quite well here; and then to marry!

You are startled by this thought? I beg you though, my dearest best father.

Nature speaks as loudly to me as to every other. Yes she is a Weber.

She is not ugly and also not less than beautiful – her entire beauty rests in two small dark eyes and in a pretty figure.

She is not witty, but has sufficient healthy human intelligence in order to be able to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother.

On the 4th of August, 1782 Mozart marries Constanze Weber in St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

Mozart’s father Leopold did not approve of the match. He mistrusts above all the mother-in-law Caecilia Weber.

He considers her a drinker only after the money yet to come. Mozart defends his fiancée after signing the marriage contract:

“What did the heavenly maiden do once the guardian had left?  She said to me – dear Mozart!  I need no written assurance from you, I trust your words as they are; and tore up the page.”

The Baroness Waldstaetten arranges the wedding feast – an unconventional woman, very much according to Mozart’s taste. She later reconciles father and son.

Things are not easy financially, but Mozart always has enough students in order to keep his head above water.

His “Akademies”, long public concerts, are much loved by the Viennese.  – here one can experience Mozart both as composer and pianist.

The public excitedly anticipates each new piano concert.  Mozart has arrived in Viennese society.

The concerts are between four and five hours in duration.

The guests eat during the concerts, talk and enjoy themselves.

It is the only opportunity to hear a new piece. And only seldom are these Academies repeated.

On one occasion Mozart found out to his horror at the last minute that he was repeating a piano concerto and the emperor was coming a second time.

He quickly fancied it up by adding a few instruments trumpet and tympani and flute so that the emperor would not be bored.

The concerts take place either in the Hofburg, in a magnificent hall, or in one of the many churches of Vienna.

Mozart is so-to-say his own businessman. He rents the room himself, has advertisements and posters printed and tickets sold.

He can take the risk – he has all the necessary contacts at his disposal.

Within the first few weeks, Mozart built up a network – that’s the best way to put it – a network of connections.

He always found female supporters who keenly campaigned on behalf of this brilliant artist.

He was a perfect dancer, a great conversationalist; he could twist language back and forth;

he could speak several languages and could move effortlessly throughout this arena.

Mozart has established him self as a freelance artist in Vienna. Financially things are going well and now life can really begin.

He has left his father’s reproaches behind him.

I believe that this liberation, including at some point from his father – assuming it took place – took him to the other extreme,

giving him this positive, dissipated, coarse manner of a young man who didn’t care much about labels.

After a few moves the Mozarts find a grand apartment in Domgasse number 5.  The Viennese call is “the Mozart house”.

And they love to throw parties and enjoy themselves. Proud, Mozart writes to his father on January 22nd, 1783: “Last week I gave a ball in my apartment

– understood that the chapeaus each paid two guilders – we began at 6 o’clock in the evening and finished at 7 o’clock – what, only one hour?  No – at 7 o’clock in the morning (...)”

What are you working on at the moment? – On a stucco ceiling. That’s the old stucco that’s been revealed, and you could say we’re now applying the finishing cosmetic touches.

– And is that the original stucco that Mozart would have seen? – That’s very likely.

It must have been bedlam. There was always something happening and there were non-stop invitations – people were exchanging invitations all the time.

To Domgasse flock many fellow musicians but also Jewish merchants and intellectuals. New social circles arise.

It all revolved around connections. It revolved around experimental attitudes, including regarding morality,

and rococo was something like staging the joy of thought, the joy of talking, the joy of performing music, the joy of conversation, as well as of course eroticism and sexuality.

In the “The Marriage of Figaro” Mozart holds a mirror up to the society. The valet Figaro wants to marry the lady’s maid Susanna.

Indeed, his master Count Almaviva also makes advances to her.

Lorenzo da Ponte produces the libretto for Mozart for the first time – a beginning of a longstanding working relationship.

Mozart is going out on a limb here, because there is no commission for “Figaro”. He is hoping for the approval of the Emperor