Two days ago, I visited the Mozarthaus in Vienna. It is a huge, old apartment building turned into a museum without changing much of it. You get an audio guide at the beginning of the tour, and the talking British guy guides you inside the building.
It has been my dream to see and walk where Mozart once lived for a very long time , with his children, his wife Constanze and his pet dog and bird, and what I felt once I finally got there cannot be described with words.
At one part of the tour, the guide asked you to "look out the window on your left". I turned, and saw a narrow, cobblestone street, wet because of the recent rain, with glamorous old buildings and apartments rising from each side. And then, the guide said: "This is the exact view Mozart saw when he looked out of this window."...
If you've ever been to Vienna, you know that the streets are pretty much the same as they were two hundred years ago, minus the infrequent souvenir shops and neon lights. So, what I saw that day out of the window of Mozart's apartment, what I see around me all the time when I'm walking down the streets, is what Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, Schubert and Schönberg saw and got inspired by. It was the same River Danube as it is now which Schubert wrote his world-famous waltz after.
Realizing this at the windowsill of the Mozarthaus made the rest of my trip a whole lot more interesting, and made my journey in Vienna, in the steps of the great master, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and also many others, much, much more special.
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