chapter 10

Vienna
David Wyn Jones

Mozart lived permanently in Vienna from 1781 until his death ten years
later in 1791. But he, together with his father Leopold, was well acquainted
with the city before that, making three substantial visits: in 1762
(September to December), 1767–68 (briefly in October, permanently
from January to December) and in 1773 (July to September). Vienna was
the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, more properly the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nations; in Mozart’s lifetime three successive
members of the Habsburg family served as emperors, Franz Stephan (the
husband of Maria Theresia) from 1745 to 1765, Joseph II from to 1765 to
1790, and Leopold II from 1790 to 1792. Salzburg was not part of the
hereditary lands directly ruled by the Habsburgs – it did not become part
of Austria until 1805 – but a principality loyal to the Habsburg dynasty,
ruled by an archbishop who was also dignified, as the family letters of
Mozart often indicate, by the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.
Much of that natural loyalty between the Salzburg principality and the
imperial capital was founded on a shared religious identity, zealously
Catholic, one that presented itself in a similar civic and rural landscape
of churches, monasteries, convents and shrines. It was also a product of
geography: Vienna was only two days’ travel by coach from Salzburg, three
if a boat was taken from Linz along the Danube to the imperial capital.
Mozart’s comments on the provincial nature of musical life in Salzburg are
often quoted, usually understood in a European context of comparison
with life in London, Mannheim, Paris and elsewhere, but it had
a particular force when applied to Salzburg and Vienna: Salzburg was
a city within a principality within an empire, whereas Vienna was the
capital of the hereditary lands (the monarchy) as well as the empire.
The lure of Vienna was a strong one, and it was entirely appropriate that
Mozart should wish to make his mark there.
The particulars of that attraction changed during Mozart’s lifetime as
political, social and economic history impacted on the role of music in
89

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 90 david wyn jones
Vienna. While the Mozart correspondence, mainly authored by Leopold
up to 1781 and by Wolfgang from 1781 onwards, sometimes refers to wider
events, as private exchanges they do not give a full account of them; usually
there was a shared knowledge of the circumstances that did not need to be
explained, allowing instead for comment on the personal successes and
failures, the gossip and intrigue that animated those circumstances.
The excitable sense of experiencing Vienna, the imperial capital, for the
first time in the autumn of 1762 is constantly evident from Leopold’s letters
back to Salzburg. Displaying the astonishing capabilities of the six-year-old
Mozart was the focus of the visit, and entry into the highest society was
facilitated by the imperial connection between the two cities. Within weeks
the young Mozart, together with his father, his mother and his sister, had
met the Empress, Maria Theresia; the Emperor, Franz Stephan; and many
of their musically talented children, including Archduke Joseph (aged 21),
Archduke Leopold (aged 15), Archduke Ferdinand (aged 8) and Archduke
Maximilian (aged 6), all of whom were to feature in Mozart’s later career.
‘Their Majesties received us with such extraordinary graciousness’ wrote
Leopold ‘that, when I shall tell of it, people will declare that I have made it
up. Suffice it to say that Wolferl jumped up on the Empress’s lap, put his
arms round her neck and kissed her heartily.’1 The Mozart family also had
lunch with the imperial Kapellmeister, Georg Reutter (1708–72), the
eighteenth to have served the musical court since its foundation at the
end of the fifteenth century. Until the middle of the eighteenth century
the musical history of the court had been one of continual expansion, but it
was Reutter’s fate to preside over a refocussing of its activities, prompted by
wider musical fashion and by the financial constraints brought about by
the Seven Years War. The long, and sometimes extremely lavish, tradition
of private operatic performances at court to celebrate birthdays, name days
and weddings of leading members of the imperial family had been dis-
continued; the former private theatre, the Burgtheater, was now a public
theatre run at arm’s length from the court; and Reutter’s duties were
restricted to providing church music, itself also the subject of increased
financial stringency. Ironically, this period of retrenchment took place
when the number of musically gifted members of the imperial family,
the Empress Maria Theresia and her nine children, was at an all-time high,
as singers, keyboard players, string players and directors, and it was this
continuing wider interest in music rather than the consequences of finan-
cial stringency that caught the attention of the Mozart family.

1
MBA, vol. 1, pp. 52–3; LMF, p. 6 (letter to Hagenauer, 19 October 1762).

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 Vienna 91
Momentarily, Leopold thought he could work in this environment:
‘If only I knew what the future will finally bring. For one thing is certain:
I am now in circumstances that allow me to earn my living here too.’2
Although the second visit by the Mozart family (father, mother and the
two children) in 1767–68 was a much longer one, over a year, it turned out
to be a completely different experience; it left Leopold, in particular, with
a very jaundiced view of musical life in the city, one that was to remain with
him for the rest of his life, informing his nervousness about Wolfgang’s
decision to move there in 1781. It began well with an audience at court. But
the court was no longer the musically engaged one of the earlier visit.
Following the death of Emperor Franz Stephan in 1765, the Empress had
become rather withdrawn; the new Holy Roman Emperor was her son,
Joseph, and the recent death of his second wife, Princess Maria Josepha of
Bavaria, also cast a shadow over the court, even though the marriage itself
had been an unhappy one. In deference to the court, the Viennese aris-
tocracy had also curtailed its musical activity.3 Control of all the theatres in
Vienna, in the suburbs as well as the court theatres in the inner city, had
been handed over to Joseph d’Afflisio, an experienced, if rather duplicitous
entrepreneur. Nominally, he had complete control but Joseph II and
Prince Kaunitz wanted to exert their influence too.4 The young Mozart
became caught in this tangle of commercial expediency and imperial
uncertainty. As a youth who had just celebrated his sixteenth birthday
and as a German rather than an Italian, he was given the doubly risky
opportunity to compose a comic Italian opera, La finta semplice, on an
existing text by the celebrated Carlo Goldoni. Mozart completed the work,
but rumour and opera-house intrigue ensured that it was never performed
in Vienna, much to Leopold’s disgust.
Five years elapsed before Leopold and Wolfgang were to return to the
city for a shorter visit of ten weeks, from 14 July 1773 to 26 September 1773.
Once again, they were received at court by Maria Theresia, but nothing
eventuated from that meeting. The visit did, however, coincide with
momentous changes in the long-standing role of the Jesuits in society, in
education as well as in religious orthodoxy. A papal bull had been issued,
dissolving the order. For Joseph II, who like many generations of the
imperial family had been educated by the Jesuits, this conveniently played

2
MBA, vol. 1, p. 57; LMF, p. 10 (letter to Hagenauer, 30 October 1762).
3
MBA, vol. 1, pp. 255–56; LMF, pp. 80–1 (letter to Hagenauer, 30 January–3 February 1768).
4
Derek Beales, Joseph II, Volume I: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 159–60. Franz Hadamowsky, Wien, Theatergeschichte: Von den Anfängen
bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1988), pp. 221–25.

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 92 david wyn jones
into a wider political agenda, the desire to reform education and to make
religious institutions more beholden to the Austrian Monarchy than to
Rome. In a rather chaotic manner, over a period of a few months, the Jesuit
order was not only formally dissolved but its property was transferred to
the state and ex-Jesuits redeployed as teachers and lay priests.5
The Vienna that Mozart grew to know in his adult years was a city of
some 210,000 citizens, one third of whom lived in the inner city,6 an area
traversed by foot in fifteen minutes or so. A walled city, it was separated
from the suburbs by heavy fortifications and, to the south and east, by an
area of open land (broadly the route of the present Ringstrasse), all
originally designed to give protection from the traditional enemy, the
Ottoman Empire. Except for some main thoroughfares, such as the
Graben, and some squares, such as Am Hof and the Mehlmarkt, it was
a crowded area with many high buildings. The spires of two churches
dominated the skyline, St Stephen’s, close to the centre of the city, and
the Augustinerkirche, adjacent to the imperial palace, the Hofburg. For
centuries, this sense of a protected enclosure had been emphasized by the
night-time closure of the city gates; in Joseph’s time, as a clear signal of
a new confidence and openness that characterized much of his reign, they
were open at all times.
Making the suburbs more accessible to the inner city was also facilitated,
with the opening of two areas of imperial parkland to the north of the city
for the use of the general public, the Augarten and the Prater, both
frequently visited by Mozart and his young family. In order to remain
close to the Hofburg, to the many aristocratic palaces and to key musical
businesses such as those of Johann Traeg, the music dealer and copyist, and
Artaria, the music publisher, Mozart lived for most of the time in the inner
city, at twelve different addresses. Rented accommodation was generally
more expensive there than in the suburbs and Mozart twice moved outside
the inner city, to the Alsergrund to the west and to the Landstrasse to the
east. Even though they were only some ten minutes away from the city
walls, Mozart would have missed the convenience of being in the inner city
and, on both occasions, his next move was back there.
A recurring topic in Mozart’s correspondence with his father during the
early 1780s is the young composer’s very traditional ambition to serve at the
imperial court. He was acquainted with Joseph II, knew many of the

5
Beales, In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, pp. 462–64.
6
Statistics from Ignaz de Luca, Topographie von Wien (Vienna, 1794; facsimile edition, Vienna:
Promedia, 2003), pp. 12–15.

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 Vienna 93
influential courtiers and it was a genuine aspiration: ‘There is no monarch
in the world whom I should be more glad to serve than the Emperor.’7
When the false rumour spread in April 1782 that he had, in fact, secured
such an appointment, he took great delight in reporting it.8 But father and
son also knew that the age-old protocols of court appointments made it
rather unlikely. Appointments were for life, compounded by the practice
of appointing from within, particularly for senior positions. In the early
1780s, the Kapellmeister was Giuseppe Bonno (1711–88), who had held the
position since 1774 having previously served for thirty-three years as
composer (Compositor). When he died in March 1788 he was succeeded
by Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) who, similarly, had worked as a composer at
court, in his case for twenty-four years. Shortly before, in November 1787,
a second composer, Gluck, had died, after thirteen years of service. It was
only at this juncture – the promotion of one composer and the death of
another – that Mozart’s ambitions could finally be realized and he was duly
appointed as composer. This satisfaction would have been tempered by the
realization that, since Salieri was only six years older than him, Mozart
would have to wait a very long time before succeeding to the highest
position.
Approximately 3 per cent of the population of Vienna were identified
as belonging to the nobility, over 7,000 individuals, divided into four
groups: princes, counts, barons and knights.9 Contrary to perceptions
that are still commonplace, the number of households that employed
a full-time retinue of musicians was very small indeed, but music as
a recreation serviced by the casual employment of musicians as perfor-
mers and teachers was socially widespread, and Mozart acted in both
capacities. Between February and April 1784, for instance, Mozart per-
formed several times at the palaces of Prince Dimitri Galitzin (long-
serving Russian ambassador) and Count Johann Baptist Esterházy
(a distant cousin of Haydn’s employer), and those two plus no fewer
than twelve princes and princesses and fifty-five counts and countesses
subscribed to the three concerts that Mozart himself organized that
season.10 Piano pupils were invariably women but, as Mozart’s letters
hint, this income stream was a fitful one, discontinued when the aris-
tocracy left for their country estates in the summer, and summarily
cancelled at other times of the year too.

7
MBA, vol. 3, p. 220; LMF, p. 814 (17 August 1782).
8 9
MBA, vol. 3, p. 201; LMF, pp. 799–800 (10 April 1782). Luca, Topographie, pp. 13–21.
10
MBA, vol. 3, pp. 303–04, 305–07; LMF, pp. 869–72 (3 March and 20 March 1784).

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 94 david wyn jones
A natural consequence of this strong tradition of private patronage was
that public concert life was not as well developed in Vienna as in some
European cities, notably London and Paris. Most concerts were one-off
occasions for the benefit of a named individual and mainly took place in
the theatres, including the two court theatres (the Burgtheater and the
Kärntnertortheater), on evenings when there were no theatrical perfor-
mances. As Mozart’s letters from the early 1780s reveal, he was particularly
anxious to take part in the charity concerts of the Tonkünstler-Societät, an
organization established in 1771 to raise money for the widows and orphans
of musicians. The society had evolved an annual pattern of presenting
a pair of concerts during Lent and a second pair of concerts in Advent, each
pair usually featuring the same repertoire and held in one of the court
theatres. By the 1780s the concerts had become highlights in the musical
calendar, and Mozart’s desire to become involved was central to his
ambition. The programmes typically featured an oratorio (or extracts
from an oratorio) together with concertos and symphonies. Mozart
became a regular participant, appearing in nine concerts between 1781
and 1791, as a soloist in his piano concertos, a composer of symphonies
and, a crucial indicator of acceptance, the composer of the cantata Davide
penitente, performed at the pair of concerts in Lent 1785.11
One of the most far-reaching musical decisions that Joseph II made as
emperor was to return the court theatres to the direct management of the
court in 1776, following a period of eleven years when they had been run by
contracted impresarios. The emperor was genuinely interested in the
theatre – spoken drama as well as opera – and liked to exercise artistic
and managerial authority on behalf of what he expected would be
a responsive and appreciative public; in thought and deed it was the
outlook of an enlightened despot. In 1776 he had set up the National
Theatre to promote plays written in German rather than in the traditional
French. Two years later, the language policy was extended to opera, and
until 1783 only Singspiele were performed, effectively marginalizing the
status of Italian opera in the eyes of the public. Traditionalists did not like
this new emphasis, and in 1783 Joseph re-engaged an Italian company to
perform comic Italian opera at the Burgtheater. But as Joseph hoped, and
certainly lived long enough to witness, this apparent volte face did not lead
to the demise of German opera in Vienna; some continued to be per-
formed in the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater, and many more in

11
David Black, ‘Mozart’s Association with the Tonkünstler-Societät’, in Simon P. Keefe (ed.), Mozart
Studies 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 55–75.

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 Vienna 95
the two suburban theatres outside the control of the court, the
Leopoldstadt theatre (north of the inner city) and the Theater auf der
Wieden (south of the inner city).12 It was against these interlocking
patterns of changes in management and artistic preferences that Mozart’s
Viennese operas were composed: Die Entführung von Serail for the German
opera troupe, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte for the re-established
Italian opera (Don Giovanni was also performed, following its premiere in
Prague) and Die Zauberflöte for the Theater auf der Wieden.
The most striking difference between Mozart’s professional life in
Salzburg and the one he led in Vienna was the part that Catholic liturgical
music played: from being central to his creative life in Salzburg, it did not
figure at all in Vienna for much of the 1780s. This was not a matter of
deliberate choice by Mozart, but a direct consequence of a concentrated
period of reform of the role of the Catholic Church in the Austrian
territories. Between 1782 and 1784 in a series of measures, Joseph II
suppressed one third of the monasteries, redirected the role of the remain-
ing two-thirds to parish work and to education, curtailed the considerable
duplication of church services in Vienna, abolished most church proces-
sions and many pilgrimages, disbanded the many brotherhoods that sup-
ported church activities (including music) and determined a new, much
reduced role for music in the liturgy.13 Mozart would have witnessed this
upheaval and its impact on the many musicians employed in Vienna’s
churches, over four hundred in number, and, though he never commented
on these changes, they were the reason why composing church music was
not a priority early in the 1780s. Only towards the end of the 1780s did
church music begin to feature once more in Mozart’s thinking. His
employment at the imperial court from 1787 and his strategic thinking
about how that career might unfold over the years seem to have encouraged
him to compose five movements (four settings of a Kyrie and one of the
Gloria), portions of masses that could be completed if and when an
opportunity presented itself. This hypothesis is given further credence by
Mozart’s plan, apparently never enacted, to petition Joseph II’s successor,
Leopold II, for a more senior position as a composer of church music at the
court and for occasional public occasions too, a genre of music, he correctly

12
Derek Beales, Joseph II, Volume II: Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 457–64. Hadamowsky, Wien. Theatergeschichte, pp. 266–77, 484–88, 504–06. Otto
Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne. Von der Einführung des Deutschen Singspiels (1778) bis
zum Tod Leopolds II. (1792) (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1970),
pp. 25–297, 455–503.
13
Beales, Against the World, pp. 271–98, 314–25.

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 96 david wyn jones
pointed out, in which he was vastly more experienced than Kapellmeister
Salieri. A year later, in May 1791, Mozart turned his thoughts to the
possibility of a post at the cathedral, St Stephen’s. The Kapellmeister,
Leopold Hofmann (1738–93), had been ill and Mozart offered to act as
his assistant, which, in accordance with standard practice, would have
almost certainly guaranteed him the post on Hofmann’s death. In the
event, Hofmann did not die until 1793, when he was succeeded by Johann
Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809).14
Mozart’s adult career in Vienna was determined by the many changes in
the musical environment that occurred between 1781 and 1791. In range
and in degree these changes amounted to one of the most eventful musical
decades of the eighteenth century in the city. Mozart had to navigate his
way through this period, responding to the new, the changing and the
traditional, in patronage, concert life, operatic life, church music and
musical commerce. The shifting dynamic of these constituent elements
made for an environment that was unique in its challenges and produced
a diversity of musical output that was not achieved by any other Viennese
composer of the time.

14
David Black, ‘Mozart and the Practice of Sacred Music, 1781-91’ (PhD thesis, Harvard University,
2007), pp. 168–72, 183–92, 286–94.

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