Another batch of stupid moral panics
Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2017 1:41 pm
In Europe I don't believe there was any such reaction to the glass harmonica.
It's a little-known fact but when Mozart died his coffin was expensively set up on a catafalque for the public to view and honour. Great quantities of black velvet were swathed around the church interior. Mozart's own Requiem Mass was performed but for the most part it was a glass harmonica that was set to play his music. After his death there was an exhibition of his death-mask and his clothes on a mannequin, again with the glass harmonica for mood music. The effect must have been eery.
This was probably the same instrument Mozart used himself in Vienna, owned by Count Deym.