The overkill is threatening to bury the music. The 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth this year has reminded everyone within reach of a radio that besides being a composer he is a global brand, a lubricant for the wheels of diplomacy, a health fad and a cult, complete with shrines and worshipping faithful.

The squiggly Mozart signature now turns up on golf balls, chocolates, musical bras and a new yoghurt. This anniversary is a force generating a tsunami of trivia and even starting a backlash. There is a show planned for Vienna called I Hate Mozart and one in Bremerhaven more brutally titled Who the F--- is Mozart?

But not in Salzburg. The town of Mozart’s birth seized the global Mozart concession in the 1920s, when the summer festival took off, and has no intention of letting it go when this year is payday. Mozart may have spent his life trying to get away from Salzburg — he settled in Vienna — but that does not mean that today’s Salzburgers are going to knock him. Their favourite son is an industry and a meal ticket. “Mozart is mercilessly marketed,” the city’s mayor said recently, “but I don’t know what Salzburg would do without him.”

Suppose that you manage to ignore the hoopla and hype and actually get to Salzburg hoping to hear the man’s music. What will you find? First, seriousness about the music itself. In the space of four days in late January we went to one opera and four concerts, ranging from a piano trio to the full majesty of the Vienna Philharmonic in the festival hall. Not one fell below first rate and all were packed.

Smile as you might at the Salzburg matrons in their big fur, big hair, big glasses and their neat menfolk who never take their jackets off, these are demanding listeners. Conductors and musicians know that special performances are required and rewarded.

The audience’s taste is not especially conservative. The January production of La Finta Giardiniera was directed by Doris Dörrie, better known as a film director and notorious for having once done Rigoletto in the style of The Planet of the Apes. This new production of one of Mozart’s lesser-known operas was set in a garden centre (walk-on flowers, assignations in garden sheds) and beautifully inventive.

In snow or sun, Salzburg is an enticing nest of spires and domes against a backdrop of distant mountains. No one would drive past without stopping. No one can drive past without noticing the one, flabbergasting exception to the harmony of landscape and stone. On one steep hill sits a large concrete blockhouse, defiantly independent in its ugliness. In case anyone misses it — hardly possible — a huge neon sign is stuck to the front. The building is, naturally, a modern art gallery.

I had expected a delicate and intimate town. But almost from the moment you reach the city’s edge, you will be reminded that Salzburg is a city with a significant and independent history.

Guides drop gentle hints that Salzburg shouldn’t really be part of Austria at all. Resentment of Vienna is everywhere and fully reciprocated: the Viennese have always been irked by Salzburg’s identification with Mozart.

When you are not listening to music, Salzburg is for strolling and stopping. You will be pushed to find a bad cup of coffee in the country that made elevenses — or, more elegantly, the Kaffeepause — an art.

Mozart would have laughed at the present-day veneration of his output. Of the three big collections of Mozartiana, I would recommend the Mozart-Wohnhaus and the Viva! Mozart exhibition over Mozart’s birthplace, the Geburtshaus. As part of a guided group, we were allowed into the holy of holies in the basement of the Wohnhaus: behind steel doors with winking lights are the most valuable Mozart manuscripts.

On one, the great man has written a few words. Perhaps a clue to his musical thinking? No, a punning wordplay on the name of a girl he has slept with. Upstairs, respectful but puzzled Japanese ladies in sensible rain hats stand before a letter from Mozart, on tour with his father, to his mother. “Leopold is healthy. He thanks you for the socks.” If the composer is sitting on his cloud looking down on the town of his birth today, he must be smiling.

Page 2 :Need to know, Mozart events

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Need to know

George Brock travelled with Travel for the Arts (020-8799 8350, www.travelforthearts.co.uk), which runs music tours and has special
trips during the Salzburg Festival in July. A three-night trip, In Mozart’s Time, costs from £895pp, including flights, tickets for Don Giovanni and sightseeing tours.

Where to eat: Alter Fuchs on Linzer Gasse and K+K on Waagplatz — with eight dining rooms over four floors — serve excellent, traditional Austrian food.

More info: www.salzburg/info.

MOZART EVENTS

Salzburg

Geburtshaus, Mozart’s birthplace (Getreidegasse 9), and Mozart-Wohnhaus (Markartplatz 8). Daily, 9am-6pm. Details: www.mozarteum.at.

Vienna

The Mozarthaus (Domgasse 5, www.mozarthausvienna.at) re-creates 18th-century Vienna. Daily 10am-8pm.

Mozart, The Enlightenment exhibition at the Albertina (Albertinaplatz, Vienna, www.albertina.at). Daily to June 20.

Prague

Further info: www.mozart2006.net.

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