Mozart Mania: Vienna cashing in on Mozart celebrity

Viking Fusion

2 years ago

VIENNA – Walking Vienna’s old town center, visitors won’t be able to miss the many souvenir shops and cafés cashing in on Mozart’s name and image. Mozart as brand is alive and well. The restaurant Kaiser’s, for example, uses the tagline, “Even Mozart loved it.”

Austria broke records for tourism in 2023, according to Bank Austria. Tourism revenue reached 3.5 billion euros, a 12.5 percent increase over the previous record set in 2019.

The Mozart ball, a dark chocolate-and-marzipan treat, is sold all over Austria, each one adorned with Mozart’s famous portrait. Famous more for their ubiquity than their taste, Mozart had nothing whatsoever to do with them.

Beyond the Kitsch: Vienna still Mozart’s city

Leopold Mozart would likely be thrilled to see his son’s name and legacy leveraged for marketing purposes, but he would also likely demand a cut of the action. Mozart’s father proved an energetic promoter of his child-prodigy son. Leopold also was his teacher and, many would say, his tormentor.

Mozart kitsch is big business. Outside of the Vienna State Opera, which was inaugurated in 1869 with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, men in Mozart costumes shill tickets to concerts designed to lure tourists. This does not sit well with people who resist the superficial celebrification of Vienna and its famous composers. Eugene Quinn, a tour guide in Vienna, said the fact that tourists come for an “artificial 19th century experience” is more than a shame; it is catastrophic.

Quinn said he has never been to a costume concert, never clopped around the old town in a horse-drawn carriage, and never taken a selfie eating a Sacher torte.

Vienna’s moral dilemma regarding Richard Wagner

“But, that’s what the tourists do,” Quinn said. “And that’s quite problematic.”

Indulging in only the “chocolate cake” parts of the city avoids the “contemporary, clever, cool experience” of learning how Vienna’s residents live and work and play, Quinn said, which is senseless because the two experiences aren’t mutually exclusive.

“It’s possible to combine the two,” he said.

–Emma Bellantoni