Prospect Park

The Daily Plant : Friday, January 27, 2006

250 Years After His Birth, We Remember Mozart

Photo by Mike Gallagher.

On this day 250 years ago, one of the world’s greatest composers was born in Salzburg, Austria. Less than a decade later, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would complete his first symphony; by the time of his death at age 35, he completed more than 600 other pieces of music.

Mozart toured with his father from a young age, his first works published in Paris and London in the early 1760s. In 1769, he received an imperial commission to compose and conduct an opera, La Finta Simplice. He was given an honorary appointment as concertmaster to the archbishop of Salzburg that same year. After spending the next two years there, he settled in Vienna as a teacher and composer, living in virtual poverty.

Mozart was at work on his Requiem at the time of his death. Among his best-known and most love works are the operas Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Magic Flute.

Today, Mozart’s creations continue to inspire composers, the music industry, and individuals the world over. For this, his contributions and accomplishments have been honored across the globe through various mediums of artistic expression. In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, for example, Mozart has been commemorated in the form of a bronze bust created by German-American sculptor Augustus Max Johannes Mueller.

The bust was dedicated in 1897 in the Concert Grove, an area of the park that two decades before had been given new performance elements by designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to accommodate musical performances and concerts—much in the style of several iconic European parks. Also within the Grove, and equally appropriate for the space, are two other statues: Henry Baerer’s bust of Ludwig van Beethoven (1894) and Chester Beach’s bust of Carl Maria Von Weber (1909).

The bust, which depicts Mozart in dressed in a period high collar and jabot ruffled shirt, was donated to Prospect Park by the United German Singers of Brooklyn, who won the statue earlier that year in the 18 national Saengerfest (singing festival). In 1997, the sculpture was conserved and the long-missing decorative bronze wreath and lyre on the base was recreated by the City Parks Foundation Monuments Conservation Program, with funding from the Florence Gould Foundation.

"To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop."

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)