Zubin Mehta looks into the audience and grins. "Mehta is back!" he says. Old age has its own wit to cover up its defenselessness and gain sympathy from those who are physically superior to it. It took the eighty-seven-year-old conductor, walking on a cane, a quarter of a minute to cover the twenty meters from the performance door to the podium in the Großes Festspielhaus, making 1.3 meters per second. The entire first half of this gala at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival for Daniel Barenboim, who turned eighty in November, had lasted one hour and forty minutes, twenty minutes of which were devoted to Beethoven's third Leonore Overture conducted by Mehta.

Now, in the second half of the gala, he says: "I've been looking for talent all my life. Tonight I have found a young conductor who will conduct the next piece. If you like the way he does it, he can continue conducting. I've already forgotten his name. Besides, he's so nervous that I had to ask Cecilia Bartoli to get him on stage." Then Cecilia Bartoli, also known as "Santa Cecilia" or "La Generosa", appears in soft pink silk and has a fragile-looking little man on her arm – Daniel Barenboim! "You may not know it yet," says the conductor and pianist, who is marked by illness, "but I have been coming to Salzburg since 1952. And it seems that it still bears me." Afterwards, Barenboim's voice breaks: "I'm too moved."

But he conducts the entire second half of the gala, standing up, accompanies Bartoli in Mozart's ravishing concert aria K. 505 also on the grand piano, and also plays "Little Man and Little Woman" by Georges Bizet four-handed on the grand piano with Martha Argerich – after Schumann's Piano Concerto. Bartoli, accompanied by Lang Lang, sings Tommaso Giordani's love song "Caro mio ben" for Barenboim. Finally, tons of flowers are brought in and a large cake full of candles. Make this moment sweet again! Everyone on stage – Plácido Domingo, Sonya Yoncheva, Rolando Villazón, Martha Argerich, Zubin Mehta and Lang Lang – sing "Happy Birthday!" accompanied by the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Florence.

The most beautiful way to surprise a person, says Baudelaire, is to give him more than he expects. After Barenboim cancelled his participation in the Whitsun Festival last week for health reasons, many expectations were exceeded here. Amid jubilation, Barenboim resigns: waving timidly, ahead of everyone, alone.