I still hear zose furrrry German consonants leaking from my boyhood wireless, enjoining me to believe in a music midway between sublimity and divinity. I resisted then and resist it still. While the 1956 purification was in full sway, a second son of Salzburg, Herbert von Karajan, seized control of the festival and yoked it to mammon. Kara- jan turned classical music into a cash cow for himself and his partners, Mozart into a commodity for sale by the boxset and Salzburg into an advertising hoarding for his enterprises.

Karajan died in 1989, two years short of the next Mozart anniversary, but his shad- ow fell upon it like Helen’s over Troy. The year 1991 was wall-to-wall Mozart world- wide. A record label issued Mozart entire on 46 CDs, fostering a nerdish fad for completism and a quantum leap in the commodification of music.

Out of the year’s Mozart glut was born Classic FM, a broadcasting franchise whose UK source (programmes may vary else- where) trickles sweet nothings into our ears while exhorting us, like a malign hypnotist, to relax, relax, relax. Mozart was recast on Classic FM as the ultimate anaesthetic, numbing our brains from cradle to grave.

Literally so. A French ear doctor, Alfred A. Tomatis, proposed that playing Mozart to the unborn would turn foetus into Einstein. In 1991 credulous politicians swallowed his hypothesis. Books were written and films made. The Mozart Effect® became a registered brand. Mercifully, a welter of research in recent years has refuted beyond resurrection the quack Tomatis theory that one com- poser, and one alone, held the key to infant genius. Millions, nonetheless, cling to the pernicious myth.

My final Mozart anniversary was opened by the Austrian President in January 2006. All 22 Mozart operas, ephemera and juve- nilia included, regaled the Salzburg summer. The Library of Congress flung open its vaults with a flourish of Mozartiana. The European Union minted a Mozart coin. The value of Mozart-branded sales that year was estimated at $5 billion. The musical value was, needless to add, negligible.