Mozart on the Mountaintop: Masonic Pilgrimage to the Magic Flute Cottage in Salzburg
During its first music festival in 1877, Salzburg hosted a ritual ceremony at a Mozart shrine. Like so many ovations in this period (Rehding 2009; Minor 2012), visitors made pilgrimage to a special site, heard choral odes, and crowned a bust in laurels. Yet the shrine itself—the rustic cottage where Mozart wrote his Magic Flute—was no ordinary monument. Some years earlier, the International Mozart Foundation had transplanted this wooden hut from Vienna to a Salzburg mountaintop and outfitted it with a towering bust of Mozart. In 1879, the foundation raised funds to encase the cottage in an Egyptian temple inspired by Magic Flute stage sets—a design later modified to a glass reliquary that better suited the ethos of pilgrimage. These early ceremonies established a lasting ritual: for decades, men’s choirs hiked nearly annually to this site and emulated the freemasons of the Magic Flute by serenading the cottage with the priests’ chorus from this opera.
While scholars have examined Mozart’s reception in England and France (Keefe 2012; Everist 2013), less attention has been devoted to his problematic status in German-speaking regions after 1870, where his music was thought too Italianate for his position in the German canon. I argue that this mountaintop ritual sought to paint the cosmopolitan Mozart with a Germanic brush. Officials in Salzburg took two approaches to this task. First, they imagined Mozart as a Beethovenian nature-buff (Painter 2006), which meant engineering a secluded Alpine setting for his composing shack. Secondly, they lauded Mozart in the choral tradition of Austrian folk-festivals. I suggest that this pilgrimage of masonic men was a precursor to the Salzburg Festival’s interwar project to position Mozart (and Salzburg) as the balm for a divided Europe, a utopian synthesis of cosmopolitan with provincial, Latinate with Germanic, art with the open air.
During its first music festival in 1877, Salzburg hosted a ritual ceremony at a Mozart shrine. Like so many ovations in this period (Rehding 2009; Minor 2012), visitors made pilgrimage to a special site, heard choral odes, and crowned a bust in laurels. Yet the shrine itself—the rustic cottage where Mozart wrote his Magic Flute—was no ordinary monument. Some years earlier, the International Mozart Foundation had transplanted this wooden hut from Vienna to a Salzburg mountaintop and outfitted it with a towering bust of Mozart. In 1879, the foundation raised funds to encase the cottage in an Egyptian temple inspired by Magic Flute stage sets—a design later modified to a glass reliquary that better suited the ethos of pilgrimage. These early ceremonies established a lasting ritual: for decades, men’s choirs hiked nearly annually to this site and emulated the freemasons of the Magic Flute by serenading the cottage with the priests’ chorus from this opera.
While scholars have examined Mozart’s reception in England and France (Keefe 2012; Everist 2013), less attention has been devoted to his problematic status in German-speaking regions after 1870, where his music was thought too Italianate for his position in the German canon. I argue that this mountaintop ritual sought to paint the cosmopolitan Mozart with a Germanic brush. Officials in Salzburg took two approaches to this task. First, they imagined Mozart as a Beethovenian nature-buff (Painter 2006), which meant engineering a secluded Alpine setting for his composing shack. Secondly, they lauded Mozart in the choral tradition of Austrian folk-festivals. I suggest that this pilgrimage of masonic men was a precursor to the Salzburg Festival’s interwar project to position Mozart (and Salzburg) as the balm for a divided Europe, a utopian synthesis of cosmopolitan with provincial, Latinate with Germanic, art with the open air.