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Mini-Mozart will be available from November for Mozart lovers and PLAYMOBIL fans from all over the world

 

The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation welcomes a new family member to its midst. In keeping with its obligations as the Mozart family’s heir and its aim of making Mozart’s music, life and personality accessible to everyone and to every generation, we have developed a new PLAYMOBIL Special Figure in close association with the geobra Brandstätter Stiftung Co. KG: the figure is Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Equipped with a violin and bow, PLAYMOBIL’s Mozart appears outside the house in which he was born and offers a delightful representation of the uniqueness of one of the greatest composers of all time.

 

For more than 250 years Wolfgang Amadé Mozart has fascinated people from all over the world not only through his music but also through his personality. The PLAYMOBIL Special Figure offers young and old alike playful access to Mozart’s life and to his time in Salzburg. The figure has been created and designed by the Research Faculty at the Salzburg Mozarteum in order to produce as realistic a likeness as possible. Mozart is depicted in his original clothes, in a red jacket – with cuffs, of course – and with a decorative waistcoat and jabot (an ornamental ruffle at the front of a shirt or jacket that was fashionable at this time). He also wears a pair of black shoes with typical gold buckles. The white wig with a plait at the back was also in vogue in Mozart’s day as a status symbol, with the hair tied at the back with a ribbon. All of these details in the design of the figure will delight not only PLAYMOBIL fans.

 

Mozart was not just a gifted composer, he also fascinated his followers above all as a pianist and a violinist. His violin concertos were all written in Salzburg. By the age of five he could already play the clavier and soon afterwards took up the violin. He was a more than competent violinist, even if he later developed mixed feelings towards the instrument. We know from the letters that he wrote during his extended visits to Munich, Mannheim and Paris in 1778–79 that he gave public performances of his extremely demanding violin concertos and also performed solos and that he was astonished by the acclaim that he received. But it was the clavier that became his main instrument during the final ten years of his life from 1781 to 1791.

 

The PLAYMOBIL Mozart performs outside the famous house in which the composer was born on 27 January 1756, a building that has a striking yellow façade. This property at 9 Getreidegasse has been owned by the Mozarteum Foundation since 1917 and is now one of the world’s most frequently visited museums. Included with the PLAYMOBIL Special Figure is a twelve-page leaflet that provides information in German and English about Mozart’s life and music and about the Mozarteum Foundation’s museums in Salzburg.

 

The Mozart PLAYMOBIL Special Figure costs 3.99 euros (recommended retail price) and is available from 4 November 2019. Retail outlets include the Mozarteum Foundation’s museum shops in the house where Mozart was born and also the property in the Makartplatz where the family later lived as well as selected shops in Salzburg. It may also be ordered online at www.mozarteum.at and at www.playmobil.com as long as stocks last.

 

The Mozarteum Foundation is a non-profit-making organization. Proceeds from the sale of the Mozart PLAYMOBIL Special Figure will be used to finance multiple activities, all of which are designed to preserve Mozart’s legacy. These include ongoing research projects and KlangKarton, an educational programme that enables children, adolescents and families to attend concerts, workshops and interviews with artists tailored to their specific age group, as well as international commitments such as its support for Mozart operas in Argentina and Cuba. In the longer term the project also helps to save additional original sources relating to the Mozart family in Salzburg. Both now and in the future these resources are intended to offer Mozartians from all over the world complete access to the composer and his music in the form of its collection of autograph manuscripts, its famous Bibliotheca Mozartiana and its Mozart museums.

 

The president of the Mozart Foundation, Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg, is delighted to be able to strike out in a new direction with the PLAYMOBIL Special Figure: “To experience Mozart playing as a child! Isn’t this something that we often wish to experience for ourselves whenever we enter his ostensibly simple but at the same time infinitely wide world of music and the emotions? This is why I am particularly pleased at having worked closely with the geobra Brandstätter Foundation and at being able to welcome our new little Mozart, a playful companion for young and old alike.”

 

Rolando Villazón, the intendant of the Mozart Week Festival and Mozart ambassador, adds: “I’m delighted to have a further Mozart representative beside me in the guise of my new little friend and shall always take him with me in my suitcase as a souvenir whenever I’m on the road. Even 250 years after his time in Salzburg it remains more true than ever that Mozart is alive and well!”