Mozart Mini-Sculpture

Uzhhorod unveiled its Mozart on 27 January 2015, the composer's 259th birthday, and put him on ice skates. He is a hand's length of bronze in the inner courtyard of the city's music school — arms out, weight over one leg, caught mid-glide. Of all the towns in Europe with a claim on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, this one has almost none.

What Mozart has to do with the Uzh

Nothing, biographically. Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791, aged thirty-five, and his touring years took him to Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, Amsterdam and Prague. There is no record of him travelling anywhere near the eastern Carpathians. The closest thread is thin: in 1791, the last year of his life, wealthy patrons in Hungary pledged him an annuity. That is as near as the documents get, and it is not near.

The sculptor, Mykhailo Kolodko, has explained the choice on other grounds — that in Mozart's day this was about the furthest corner of the empire, and even here his fame arrived. One detail in that needs correcting. Austria-Hungary did not exist in Mozart's lifetime; the dual monarchy was created by the Compromise of 1867, seventy-six years after his death. The substance survives the correction. Ung county was a remote north-eastern district of the Kingdom of Hungary under Habsburg rule, and Vienna was its capital in every way that counted. Sheet music, repertoire and taste came up the same roads as everything else, late and thinned out, but they came. That is the entire claim the statuette makes, and a music-school courtyard is the right address for it.

The best there was

So, the skates. Kolodko's reasoning is plain: he holds Mozart to be the finest there has ever been, and in his private grammar a skater is a person who moves without visible effort, over the top of ordinary life. By local account the idea followed a trip to Vienna, after which he offered it to the school.

What came out has no marble in it. No wig, no keyboard, no dignified stance on a plinth — a man in motion, close to dancing. Kolodko has since put a second skater in this city, the painter Tivadar Csontváry, down on the embankment railing. Csontváry earned his: he really did skate on the frozen Uzh as a schoolboy, and said so. Mozart's are pure argument.

Through the gate on vul. Voloshyna

The bronze stands in the courtyard behind the P. Tchaikovsky music school at vul. Voloshyna 11, a few minutes from the centre. You have to walk in to see it, which makes this one of the few miniatures you cannot stumble across — the rest are bolted to railings, kerbs and walls, more than fifty of them in the centre alone since Kolodko began the series in 2010.

Come on a weekday and the placement explains itself: scales through an open window, someone repeating one phrase until it sits, and out in the yard a small bronze man to whom none of it ever sounded like work.