As a backpacker in 1990, we would save money on hotels by taking overnight trains. We would often arrive in countries before anything opened, which meant that we would sit in a park with our backpacks and fall asleep waiting for the cities to open. We took turns leaning on each other.
Tanya and I arrived in Salzburg at dawn and stepped outside the train station, the mountains soaring around us, the smell of baking bread leading us to a little bakery shaped like a gingerbread house. The smell of baking bread makes me feel like I’m floating, and I can’t even remember touching the sidewalk that morning as I followed the wafting scent. In an effort to save money, we bought one loaf of dark bread that weighed more than Tanya. We tore off pieces all morning, sharing it with everyone we met, but maybe it was magic bread because it never seemed to get smaller.
Why did we choose to trek to Salzburg? One word: Mozart. I loved Mozart, and I wanted to see where he was born and where he grew up. I wanted to breathe the same air that had nourished this genius who had enriched my life in so many ways.
I walked reverently through his house like I was in a church. When I saw his piano with its delicate wood, and imagined his fingers on the keys, I wanted to cry. I couldn’t believe that I was looking at his actual piano, the one where he wrote he wrote music that actually changed people’s lives.
Mozart began composing at the age of five. Five! Can you imagine a small boy sitting at the piano and writing a minuet when his feet didn’t even touch the floor? He wrote his first opera at the age of 14.
His handwritten sheet music was on display in glass cases. I stared at the sheets for a long time, imagining his hand holding a pen and writing such beautiful music. The notes looked like their own language, like a message from an ancient civilization giving out a secret code for euphoria. When I walked outside his house, I sat down on the steps and to take in everything I had just seen.
I looked at the stone steps beneath me and wondered if he ever sat down right here and listened to the birds sing? Did he eat his own loaf of black bread while inhaling the pine trees and watching the light change?
Or was it hard for him to sit down and listen to birds when music was stampeding through his head like wild pianos let loose in the mountains? If he was writing symphonies and operas as a child, I wonder what it was like inside his mind? Was it lush and gorgeous, like the music, or did it get chaotic in there until it got out of his head and onto the page?
I like to imagine the mountains around his home filled with wild stampeding pianos.
Tanya came and sat next to me on the steps and I told her my vision of pianos, galloping around the mountains, breathless, wild, and glorious. I told her I had heard that if you give them a warm loaf of bread, it calms them so they will sit still and you can play the most enchanting music. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, like she does when she’s not sure if I’ve truly lost my mind or just making up another story. She laughed and laid her head on my shoulder and together we watched the sunlight on the leaves, smelling the fireplaces and crisp autumn air.
Now I can’t stop thinking of the stampeding pianos of Salzburg, and in my dreams, they gallop around the mountains, breathless and wild and glorious. If you catch one, you can sit down and make music like Mozart.
