Mozart Residence

In September seventeen seventy-seven, Leopold Mozart, the head of the family and deputy director of the court chapel, was ill as he handled the luggage at the carriage. His wife Anna Maria and his twenty-one-year-old son Wolfgang were leaving the apartment on Makartplatz. Leopold did not yet know that he was seeing his wife off for the last time.

The father and son had planned the journey. Wolfgang served as a court musician for one hundred fifty guilders a year and wanted to find a position where operas would be commissioned from him and he would be paid more. His employer, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, answered the request for leave by dismissing both Mozarts. Leopold received almost four hundred guilders a year. He did not dare lose two salaries at once and set out in search of work with no secure income: he withdrew his request and kept his position. Wolfgang’s mother traveled with him.

Leopold remained in these rooms and directed his son’s search by letter. Wolfgang found no permanent position in Munich, Mannheim, or Paris, and expenses rose. In Paris, Anna Maria fell ill and died on July third, seventeen seventy-eight.

In a letter from this apartment, Leopold told his son that his mother had sacrificed herself for him and would not have died in Salzburg. Those were the words of a father shaken by his wife’s death, not a medical conclusion. That same summer, he was already seeking a new position for Wolfgang at the Salzburg court. The Prince-Archbishop agreed to take the musician on as an organist with a salary of four hundred fifty guilders—three times his former pay.

In January seventeen seventy-nine, Wolfgang returned to this house alone. The reconciliation with Salzburg lasted less than two years. In November seventeen eighty, he left to prepare the opera “Idomeneo” in Munich and never again lived in the apartment on Makartplatz. Leopold remained here until his death in seventeen eighty-seven.

Mozart Residence was named after the family apartment where the father tried to preserve the income and bring his son back, while the family lost its mother on a single journey. A bomb destroyed two thirds of the building in nineteen forty-four; the ruined rooms were later rebuilt from old plans. The historic Dancing Master’s Hall survived. It is now a museum, and its underground repository holds about two hundred letters from Wolfgang and about three hundred letters from Leopold.