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A man and a woman look at Gustav Klimt’s painting "The Kiss".
At this very moment two people are losing themselves in a kiss that changed the art world forever. When will it change y
Klimt 2012
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The child prodigy
Leopold Mozart proved a successful manager to his children: In 1762 the Mozart children travelled to Vienna for several months, where they played to Empress Maria Theresa in the hall of mirrors at Schönbrunn Palace. After the concert, quite unabashed, Wolferl jumped up onto the empress’s lap, hugged and kissed her. The child prodigy, a little man with a powdered wig and miniature dagger, was the talk of the town.
In 1768, during the Mozart family’s second visit to the imperial capital, Maria Theresa gave the twelve-year-old a two-hour audience at the Imperial Palace, the residence of the Habsburg family for over 600 years. By this time, Wolfgang was a much-travelled man: He was familiar with London, Paris, Brussels and many cities in Germany, and had performed in many stately homes, and (when his purse was nearly empty) even in bourgeois dance halls.
In the autumn of 1781, Mozart gave a concert at the Imperial Palace in honour of the Duke of Württemberg. He spent Christmas Eve the same year with Maria Theresa’s son, Emperor Joseph II, at the imperial apartments.