A father who kept the receipts

A boy of seven is lifted onto a chair so that the audience can see his hands reach the keyboard, and the man who lifts him is already counting the evening: the fee agreed beforehand, the gratuities that might follow, the cost of getting the family home again. His father keeps the receipts. He keeps the itineraries, the programmes, the lodging bills and the long letters written back to Salzburg describing each engagement and each payment, and that paperwork is why the Mozart life and career can be reconstructed from documents where most eighteenth-century childhoods survive as a parish entry and a rumour. Why do we know so much more about this childhood than about almost any other of the period? The short answer is the ledger. The full answer has to wait until the tours themselves are on the table, because paperwork only explains itself once its purpose is clear.

The claim this account defends is simple to state and slow to prove. Mozart was the first major composer to attempt a career without a permanent patron, and almost everything strange about his last decade, the income, the debts, the output and the exhaustion, follows from the fact that nobody had yet worked out how to do that. A salaried chapel had sustained Bach through decades of argument with his employers. A blend of court appointment and foreign impresarios would sustain Haydn. The open market that a later century learned to take for granted, with publishers paying royalties, agents arranging tours and copyright attaching a composer’s name to a stream of income, did not exist in the Vienna of 1781. The man who walked out of Salzburg service and into that unfinished market was twenty-five years old, and he had been a professional musician since he was six.

What survives, then, is not a legend with documents attached but a documentary record unusually complete for a working musician of the time. The letters home were business reports before they were anything else, written by a father to the Salzburg friend who managed the family’s affairs in their absence, and they price things: rooms, meals, fees, gifts of snuffboxes and watches, the wages of the servants who travelled with the children. Ruth Halliwell, the historian who reads the Mozart household as a working family rather than a backdrop, points out that several hands kept this record across three decades, so that the archive reflects a household habit and not one man’s obsession. That habit is the reason a biographer can test the famous anecdotes against dated paper instead of repeating them on trust.

A life told this way has a shape imposed by the evidence. The childhood is documented almost day by day because it was conducted in public and on the road. The Salzburg years are documented through petitions, salary records and a father’s frustrated correspondence. The Vienna decade is documented through subscription lists, publishing contracts, borrowing letters and an estate inventory, which means the money can be followed with a precision that invites argument, and the argument over the money has become one of the central disputes of the biography. This article stays with the life itself: the people, the posts, the earnings, the household and the grave. How the music is built, which works matter most, what later composers took from it and whether the reputation is deserved are separate questions, argued in their own places.

Salzburg and the Mozart household

Salzburg in 1756 was a small ecclesiastical capital, ruled by a prince-archbishop whose court set the terms of musical life for everyone within reach of it. The city had a cathedral, a university, a court orchestra and a limited appetite for novelty, and a musician born there faced a plain choice between the archbishop’s payroll and the road. Into this setting, on 27 January 1756, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart was born, the seventh child of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl, and the second of their children to survive infancy. His sister Maria Anna, four and a half years older and called Nannerl inside the family, was the other survivor. Five siblings had died in their first months, a rate of loss that was unremarkable for the period and that shaped the household’s fierce concentration on the two children who lived.

Leopold Mozart was forty years old in the year of his son’s birth if one counts loosely, thirty-six by the register, and he was considerably more than a provincial violinist waiting for genius to happen to him. He held the post of fourth violinist in the court orchestra, he had published a treatise on violin playing in 1756 that made his name across German-speaking Europe, and he composed diligently in the serviceable style his posts required. The family lived on the third floor of a house on the Getreidegasse, in rooms let from a merchant family, and the household economy rested on a court salary that was respectable and insufficient in roughly equal measure. Anna Maria, born in St Gilgen and raised partly in Salzburg, ran the domestic side of an enterprise that would soon become itinerant.

The household matters because it was the firm. When the children’s abilities became apparent, first Nannerl’s at the keyboard and then her brother’s at a level that startled every professional who heard him, the family reorganised itself around the fact. Leopold’s own composing thinned and then stopped. His ambitions for promotion at court stalled, partly through absence and partly through the archbishop’s cooling regard for a servant who was so often elsewhere. What emerged was a family business with two performing assets, one manager, and a product that had to be sold in person, city by city, because no other distribution existed for it. Halliwell’s reading of the family insists on exactly this collective character: the letters are full of joint decisions, shared money and shared risk, and the enterprise looks less like a father exploiting a child than like a small firm in which every member’s labour was committed.

The Salzburg that framed all of this was also a place with a ceiling. The court’s musical establishment was modest, the opera intermittent, the opportunities for a composer of ambition narrow and slow. A boy trained to the level Wolfgang reached by his early teens had nowhere inside the archbishopric to go except into the very service his father already found cramping. That structural fact sits underneath the later drama of the break with Salzburg. Long before any quarrel, the arithmetic of the place guaranteed that a musician of this calibre would either leave or shrink, and everyone in the Getreidegasse household appears to have understood it.

Leopold as teacher, manager and author

The treatise came first, and it is the key to everything that followed. Leopold’s Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, published in Augsburg in the year of Wolfgang’s birth, was a systematic account of violin technique and musical taste that went through repeated editions and a Dutch and French translation, and it established its author as one of the leading pedagogues in the German lands. The man who taught the Mozart children was therefore not an amateur with a talented son. He was a published authority on how musical skill is built, and he built it in his own children with the same methodical attention he had described in print: graded difficulty, constant correction, early exposure to the best available models, and performance used as a test rather than a reward.

Was Mozart a child prodigy or a trained performer?

The documents support trained performer first. Leopold was a leading published pedagogue who began both children at the keyboard in earliest childhood, supervised daily practice, corrected their earliest scores and used public performance as the last stage of a lesson. Exceptional aptitude is plain in the record, but it arrived inside a system built to produce it.

The earliest compositions show the system at work. The little pieces Wolfgang produced from the age of five survive in the notebook Leopold kept for Nannerl, and the manuscripts of the first sonatas and symphonies carry corrections and completions in the father’s hand, thinning as the boy’s own hand strengthens. Cliff Eisen, the editor whose work on the Mozart letters and documents sets the standard for what the paper trail can bear, treats these layered manuscripts as the normal evidence of a workshop: a master craftsman finishing an apprentice’s work until finishing was no longer needed. Nothing in the paper suggests the father wrote the music. Everything in it suggests he taught, edited and presented the boy who did, which is a different and more interesting story.

The management was as systematic as the teaching. Leopold negotiated engagements, cultivated correspondents in the cities ahead, timed arrivals to court calendars, and wrote home in a detail that lets a modern reader reconstruct prices across three countries. He also understood publicity in a form the period allowed: dedications of the boy’s first published sonatas to royal patrons in Paris and London placed the child’s name inside the households that mattered, and the printed works themselves, sonatas a competent amateur could play, carried the reputation into rooms the family never entered. Whether this machinery amounted to professional management or to exploitation is one of the standing arguments of the biography, and both cases deserve their strongest form. For the management reading: the tours were the only route by which such training could be paid for and such talent placed, the children were educated to a standard few schools matched, and the earnings supported the whole family including the daughter’s future. For the exploitation reading: the children’s childhoods were spent in carriages and lodgings, their health was risked on schedule, and the father’s income and standing rose with their labour. The documents support the facts of both cases and settle neither, because the same ledger records the fees and the illnesses without comment. What turned on this training, for music education generally, is traced in the series study of the prodigy myth and how music education built it.

The deepest fact about the childhood documentation lands here, before the tours are even described. The childhood is documented because it was a managed commercial enterprise with an archive. Receipts survive because money was at stake in every engagement. Letters survive because the manager reported to a partner at home. Programmes and dedications survive because they were instruments of trade. Strip away the enterprise and the same childhood would be as silent as every other musician’s childhood of the century, known from a baptismal register and a gravestone. The archive is not a fortunate accident that happened to a genius. It is the residue of a business.

Nannerl and the sister who was also a prodigy

Maria Anna Mozart was born on 30 July 1751, and for the first years of the family’s public life she was not the supporting act but half the attraction and sometimes the headline. The earliest tour bills place her name alongside or ahead of her younger brother’s, and the reviews that survive praise her keyboard playing in the language reserved for finished artists. She had begun lessons at seven, taught by her father with the same rigour he later applied to Wolfgang, and the notebook in which her first pieces were written down became, by family economy, the book into which her brother’s first attempts were also entered. The two children were presented as a pair: the girl of eleven or twelve playing concertos and sonatas of real difficulty, the small boy beside her doing things no one of his age was supposed to be able to do at all.

Her standing among professionals was not a courtesy extended to a child. In London, in Paris and in the German courts, the reports distinguish between the siblings’ kinds of astonishment: his was freakish and improvisatory, hers was accomplished and exact. She performed the repertory of the day at the level the day demanded, which is the plainest evidence that Leopold’s teaching produced excellence and not merely novelty. When the family’s touring wound down in the later 1760s, it was her career that ended, not her ability. She was approaching the age at which a young woman of her station was expected to withdraw from public performance and prepare for marriage, and the economics of the firm changed with her: a daughter on tour past eighteen was a reputational risk rather than an asset, and no amount of talent altered the calculation.

Here the second rung of this article’s argument comes into view. His sister was a performer of comparable standing whose career ended for reasons unrelated to ability. Nothing in the record suggests her playing declined, that audiences tired of her, or that she wished to stop for artistic reasons. The mechanism that ended her public life was social, and it operated on schedule. She stayed in Salzburg, gave piano lessons to the daughters of the local gentry, and watched her brother’s career depart for Italy and Vienna without her. The contrast is rarely stated as plainly as the documents allow: the same household, the same teacher, the same early training, and two careers divided by the conventions governing a daughter’s adulthood.

Her later life was respectable and narrow. In 1784 she married Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, a magistrate and a widower with children, and moved to St Gilgen, the village where her mother had been born; she returned to Salzburg a widow in 1801 and taught again into old age. She kept her brother’s memory with a guardedness that later sections of this article will have reason to examine, because her testimony, given late and through intermediaries, became one of the main sources for the childhood chapters of the early biographies. She outlived Wolfgang by thirty-eight years, dying in Salzburg in October 1829, and the length of that survival matters to the biography: for nearly four decades, the only surviving member of the touring family was a woman whose own part in the enterprise the nineteenth century progressively forgot.

The tours and what they were for

The family left Salzburg in June 1763 and did not return for three and a half years. The itinerary of that single undertaking still reads like a campaign: Munich and Augsburg, the courts at Ludwigsburg and Schwetzingen, Frankfurt, where the fourteen-year-old Goethe saw the boy perform and remembered the powdered wig and the little sword decades afterwards, then Brussels and Paris, where the children played at Versailles and the boy’s first sonatas were engraved with a dedication to a daughter of Louis XV. London followed in April 1764 and held them for fifteen months: performances before George III and Queen Charlotte, anthems and symphonies composed for the city’s concert life, and daily contact with Johann Christian Bach, the Queen’s music master, whose ease of manner and Italianate style the boy absorbed at the keyboard in four-hand improvisations. The return ran through the Netherlands, where both children fell seriously ill at The Hague and the tour paused for weeks, then Paris again, then Switzerland and Munich, reaching Salzburg at the end of November 1766.

Shorter expeditions framed the great one. In January 1762 the children had been tried out in Munich, and in the autumn of that year the family performed in Vienna and before the imperial court at Schönbrunn, an early success that taught Leopold what the market would bear. After 1766 came the Vienna journey of 1767 and 1768, undertaken for an opera commission that collapsed amid court intrigue, and the journeys into Italy that belong to the next section. But the grand tour was the formative enterprise, and its purposes were layered. It earned money, in fees, gratuities and the sale of engraved music. It advertised, planting the name in courts and capitals that could later be asked for posts, pupils and subscriptions. And it educated, exposing the boy to the French style at Versailles, the Italian style in London through Johann Christian Bach, the Mannheim orchestra’s discipline on the way home, and the working methods of every opera house and chapel the family could enter.

That layering is what closes the question opened in the first section. Why do we know so much more about this childhood than any other of the period? Because the tours were run as a reporting business. Leopold wrote home to Lorenz Hagenauer, his landlord and friend, with an accountant’s regularity, and Hagenauer kept the letters. The family knew the value of paper because paper was how engagements were secured, credit was maintained and claims were proved. The famous childhood is not better documented because the child was more famous at the time; plenty of courts saw him and forgot. It is better documented because the enterprise that carried him generated records as a by-product of staying solvent, and because the household then kept those records as carefully as it had made them. The archive and the career were the same thing viewed from two sides.

The tours also had a strategic purpose that only becomes visible in retrospect. Leopold was auditioning Europe on his children’s behalf, looking for the appointment that would convert a travelling attraction into a settled and salaried future, ideally at a court grander than Salzburg’s. The audition failed in his lifetime on the terms he wanted: offers came with conditions, posts went to others, and the family always came home. But the network built in those years, the correspondents, the former hosts, the musicians met and remembered, formed the capital on which the adult Wolfgang would draw when he staked everything on Vienna. The tours were the firm’s past. They were also, though nobody could have phrased it so, the market research for the freelance experiment that ended the story.

What the touring years cost the family

The ledger records prices, and some of the prices were paid in health. Travel in the 1760s meant unheated carriages, bad roads, damp lodgings and the diseases of every crowded city on the route, and the Mozarts’ letters are punctuated by illness: the children’s near-fatal sickness at The Hague in the winter of 1765 and 1766, when first Nannerl and then Wolfgang lay ill for weeks and the tour’s finances bled out in lodging and doctors’ bills; the smallpox that struck during the Vienna journey of 1767, which drove the family to refuge in Olomouc and left Wolfgang, who caught the disease there, blinded for days at its height and marked by it afterwards. Leopold reported these episodes home in the same even tone he used for receipts, which can mislead a quick reader into thinking them minor. They were not minor. Twice in five years the enterprise came within a margin of losing one of its two performers, and with the performer would have gone the income, the strategy and the family’s future.

The quieter costs were cumulative. Schooling, in any form a settled child would recognise, did not happen; what the children knew beyond music came from the road, from tutors hired in passing and from their father’s instruction, which was broad in languages and literature and narrow in everything that required staying in one place. Nannerl’s girlhood was spent in other people’s houses. Wolfgang’s friendships until adolescence were with the musicians, patrons and servants of a travelling life, relationships that dissolved at each departure. Anna Maria’s health and spirits surface in the letters obliquely, in illnesses and in the long silences of the partner who did not write the reports. And Leopold’s own career paid in full: his composing, respectable and published, dwindled to nothing; his promotion at Salzburg stalled and then reversed in the archbishop’s favour; the violin treatise that had made his name received no successor. By the time the family settled again in Salzburg, the father had spent his professional prime as a manager, and the investment had exactly one remaining vehicle.

None of this makes the tours a mistake by the standards the family could apply. Settled Salzburg offered the children a ceiling of provincial service, and the road offered them, and demonstrably gave them, the best musical education available anywhere in Europe. The cost accounting matters for a different reason. It explains the intensity of Leopold’s later conduct, the grip he kept on his son’s decisions long after the son was grown, the fury at money spent and posts refused. A man who has sunk his own career, his wife’s comfort and his daughter’s prospects into a single enterprise does not experience its manager’s defection as an ordinary disagreement. When the break came in 1781, it broke something that had been load-bearing for twenty years, and the letters of that summer are unintelligible without the touring years behind them.

The Italian journeys and the apprenticeship in opera

Italy was the one credential the grand tour had not supplied, and between December 1769 and March 1773 father and son made three journeys there to obtain it. Opera was the commanding genre of European music, its system was Italian, and a composer who had not been produced in an Italian house carried a gap in his papers that every employer could see. The first journey ran the length of the peninsula: Verona and Mantua, then Milan, where the fourteen-year-old received a commission for the carnival opera Mitridate, re di Ponto and delivered it to sceptical singers who revised their opinion at the rehearsals; Bologna, where Padre Giovanni Battista Martini, the most respected teacher in Europe, took the boy through counterpoint exercises and sponsored his admission to the Accademia Filarmonica, an honour granted after an examination in strict style that the academy’s own records preserve; Rome, where the Pope conferred the Order of the Golden Spur, a distinction Gluck also held; and Naples, where the conservatories and theatres completed the survey.

The second journey, in 1771, brought the serenata Ascanio in Alba for an archducal wedding in Milan, performed within a festival whose senior opera was by Johann Adolf Hasse, then the grand old man of the Italian stage. The third, in 1772 and 1773, produced Lucio Silla for the Milan carnival. Each journey tightened the boy’s command of the Italian machinery: how a libretto was set scene by scene, how arias were tailored to a contracted singer’s voice and vanity, how rehearsals in an Italian house actually ran. This was an apprenticeship served at the highest available level, and it was completed before he was seventeen. It is worth pausing on the discipline involved. The operas were not school exercises. They were commercial productions with paying audiences, professional casts and rivals in the same city, and they succeeded.

Yet the strategic object of the Italian journeys was never secured. Leopold angled for a post for his son at Milan, at Florence, at any court where the new credential might be cashed, and the answers were courteous versions of no. The Archduke Ferdinand in Milan was willing; his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, was not, and her private verdict on the Mozarts as travelling people who went about the world like beggars survives in a letter to her son that the family never saw. The journeys therefore closed with a paradox that runs through the whole biography. The training could not have been better, the endorsements could not have been weightier, and the market’s response was applause without employment. Italy certified Mozart. It did not hire him, and the family rode home to the Salzburg service they had been trying to escape, with the son now overqualified for the post that awaited him and the father aware of it.

Employment at the Salzburg court

The post was Konzertmeister to the archbishop, a title Wolfgang had carried in an honorary way since boyhood and now, from 1772, held as a working court servant, with his salary settled at 150 florins a year and raised in time. The duties were those of the court’s musical staff: leading and supplying the orchestra, composing for the cathedral and the court calendar, producing serenades and divertimenti for named occasions. The five violin concertos of 1775 belong to this service, written for his own use as leader or for the court’s other violinists, and so do the masses, litanies and church sonatas that filled the chapel’s Sundays. The archbishop under whom he served, Hieronymus Colloredo, had succeeded in 1772 and governed as a reformer of the enlightened type, cutting ceremonial expense and shortening the liturgy, which put hard limits on the church music his chapel was permitted to perform: masses had to be brief, instruments restrained, display suspect.

For a composer, Salzburg service had a double character that is worth separating. As a workshop it was not contemptible: a standing orchestra, a cathedral choir, regular deadlines and a father on the premises as deputy Kapellmeister gave a young composer continuous practical employment while he matured. As a career it was a trap. The pay was that of a respectable servant. The social rank of court musicians placed them with the valets and cooks rather than the officials. Leave to travel, the one activity that had built the family’s name, was granted sparingly and resented openly. And the repertory demanded by a reforming archbishop and a provincial court narrowed year by year toward the functional. The church music duties alone, performed inside Colloredo’s limits week after week, show the shape of the constraint: a musician formed by the opera houses of Italy was employed to write short masses for a chapel that did not want long ones. The wider story of how court and chapel employment structured a composer’s working life in this period runs through the series survey of music and religion through history, and Salzburg is one of its clearest cases.

The friction became formal in 1777. Wolfgang asked for leave to seek work elsewhere; the archbishop answered with a dismissal so phrased that it took the father down with the son, and Leopold had to petition his way back into the service he had never resigned from. The settlement defined the next phase: Leopold restored to his post and his salary, Wolfgang released to travel, the family split between the servant it could not spare and the asset it could not place. Wolfgang left Salzburg in September 1777, for the first time without his father, and with his mother in the father’s place as companion and chaperone. He was twenty-one, famous in half the courts of Europe, and available for hire. The journey that followed is the hinge on which the biography turns, because it tested, city by city, whether fame could be converted into a livelihood without Leopold managing the conversion.

The archbishop and the conditions of service

Hieronymus Colloredo deserves his strongest version before he is cast as the villain of the story, because the casting has been done carelessly for two centuries. He was a serious reforming ruler of a small state, committed to fiscal discipline, administrative modernisation and a rationalised church, and he applied the same discipline to his musical establishment that he applied to his monasteries and his budget. From his side of the desk, the Mozarts were difficult servants: the father senior, talented and perpetually requesting leave; the son a prodigy whose European reputation the court was expected to subsidise with salary, absence and indulgence disproportionate to the services actually rendered in Salzburg. A ruler who believed musicians were employees, and said so, was not a monster of philistinism. He was an employer with a theory of employment that most of his fellow princes shared in practice and were merely politer in expressing.

From the servants’ side, the conditions were what the letters say they were. Pay was low and rose slowly. Status was lower than pay: court musicians in Salzburg ranked below the valets in the household order, a humiliation Mozart’s letters return to with a consistency that suggests it stung more than the money. Leave was a favour, not a right, and its refusal ended strategies. Composition itself was directed from above, in genre, in length and in occasion, by a patron whose taste ran to brevity and utility. Maynard Solomon, the biographer who rebuilt the adult life from the financial and documentary record, reads the Salzburg conflict as structural rather than personal: a system that treated the composer as a liveried craftsman was colliding with a musician whose training and reputation had outgrown the category, and the collision would have occurred under any archbishop. The personal contempt was real, on the evidence of the correspondence, but it was the accelerant, not the fire.

Both readings can be held at once because they operate at different levels, and the biography is distorted whenever either is dropped. Drop the structural reading and the story becomes a melodrama of genius against tyranny, which flatters the reader and explains nothing about the hundreds of musicians who lived inside the same system without rebellion. Drop the personal reading and the documented anger of the letters, Leopold’s as well as Wolfgang’s, becomes unintelligible, since men do not write like that about abstractions. The conditions of service in Salzburg were the normal conditions of the old musical order in its late, tightening phase. What was abnormal was the employee: trained in Italy, fêted in London and Paris, and increasingly unable to mistake the livery for a life. The archbishop did not create that tension. He merely declined, on principle and within his rights as an employer, to relieve it.

The job-hunting journey and the death of his mother

The journey that began in September 1777 was an audition tour with the management removed, and its results read like a controlled experiment in what Leopold’s machinery had been doing. In Munich, the Elector received the young composer kindly and explained, in substance, that there was no vacancy: praise in abundance, no post. In Augsburg he bought a good fortepiano, played for the patricians and visited his cousin Maria Anna Thekla, to whom he wrote the exuberant private letters that later editors handled with gloves. In Mannheim, which had the finest orchestra in Germany, he stayed for months, absorbed the playing of the court musicians, taught, composed, and fell in love with Aloysia Weber, the second daughter of a music copyist, whose singing he championed with a young man’s total conviction. Mannheim gave him everything except the thing he had come for. The Elector Palatine moved his court to Munich, the hoped-for appointment evaporated, and in March 1778 Mozart travelled on to Paris with his mother, carrying introductions, a portfolio and diminishing money.

Paris had applauded the child in 1763. It had no particular use for the man. He taught the daughter of a duke and disliked the teaching, placed a symphony with the Concert Spirituel that was well received, quarrelled by letter with his father over strategy and money, and turned down the one concrete offer that materialised, the organist’s post at Versailles, because the salary and the prospect both bored him. Through the spring his mother, whose health had never been strong and who was miserable in the Paris lodgings, fell ill. Anna Maria Mozart died in Paris on 3 July 1778, aged fifty-seven. Her son, who had delayed alarming Salzburg and who dreaded the letter he now had to write, asked a family friend, the Abbé Bullinger, to prepare Leopold for the news, and wrote home himself in terms of a grief managed for its reader. She was buried at Saint-Eustache. The biography does not need to linger here, and neither did he: what the documents show is a twenty-two-year-old alone in an expensive city, newly aware that the family enterprise had lost its quiet partner and that its manager, three hundred miles away, held him partly responsible.

The return journey completed the education. Mannheim again, where Aloysia, newly established as a singer at Munich, received him with a coolness he reported home in pain. Munich again, empty-handed. Leopold, meanwhile, had negotiated the only outcome on offer: Salzburg would take his son back, at a better salary and with the organist’s post added, and the father extracted the son’s submission letter by letter across the winter. Mozart reached Salzburg in January 1779 and took up the appointment he had left the service to escape, now as court organist at 450 florins a year. The experiment of 1777 to 1779 had proved its point with unusual clarity. Fame, unassisted by management, did not convert into employment. The lesson he drew from it was not, however, the lesson his father intended. Leopold concluded that the son needed supervision. The son concluded that he needed a bigger market.

The break with Salzburg

The organist years were productive and airless: church music for the cathedral, the great C major mass and the concertos and serenades the court required, and then, in 1780, the commission that exposed the gap between his standing and his situation. The Elector of Bavaria ordered an opera seria for the Munich carnival, Idomeneo, and Mozart went to Munich in November 1780 to rehearse it, working with a librettist, a cast and an orchestra of the first rank, in a city that treated him as what he was. The letters home from Munich are the happiest of his adult life. The premiere in January 1781 succeeded. Within weeks he was summoned to Vienna, where Archbishop Colloredo was attending the celebrations for the accession of Joseph II, and ordered to present himself not as the composer of Idomeneo but as a servant in the archiepiscopal suite.

Why did Mozart leave Salzburg?

The documents point to a wager, not a tantrum. Vienna in the spring of 1781 showed him pupils, patrons and concert fees Salzburg could never match, while the archbishop’s household treated him as a servant, seated him with the valets and forbade him to perform for himself. He resigned to bet on the market he had just seen.

What followed is documented almost entirely in his own letters to his father, and the sequence should be held to what those letters say. He was lodged with the archbishop’s household and fed at the servants’ table, placed, as he wrote, above the cooks but below the valets whose company the seating implied. He was refused permission to perform at a charity concert for widows and orphans of musicians, at which the Emperor would be present and at which he had reason to expect both money and notice. He performed anyway in private houses, acquired pupils, and began to calculate in writing what Vienna could pay a man who was allowed to work in it. In May, after a confrontation in which the archbishop called him names he repeated to Leopold verbatim, he resolved to resign. The resignation was not accepted cleanly; there were weeks of evasion, a final interview with the chief steward Count Arco, and a dismissal which Mozart reported to his father as having been delivered, at the end, with a kick. The kick comes from his letter and should be cited as his account; the fact of the dismissal is not in dispute.

This is where the third rung belongs, because the break is usually told as a bid for artistic freedom and the documents tell a colder story. Leaving Salzburg was not a bid for artistic freedom but a bet on a market that did not yet exist. He did not resign in order to write what he pleased; in Salzburg he had written much of what he pleased within the chapel’s limits, and in Vienna he would write to order for the rest of his life. He resigned because Vienna in eight weeks had shown him teaching fees, subscription income and aristocratic patronage on a scale that made 450 florins and a place below the valets look like the worse gamble. Leopold’s terror at the decision, expressed in letters of mounting desperation, was the terror of the manager watching the firm’s only asset walk out of the only structure he understood. Both men were reading the same market. They disagreed about whether it was there.

Vienna and the freelance experiment

Vienna in 1781 was the largest German-speaking city in Europe and the seat of an emperor who fancied himself a reformer of everything, including music. Its musical economy was unlike Salzburg’s in kind rather than degree. There were aristocratic houses that maintained private orchestras and competed for composers. There was a wealthy stratum of officials, bankers and merchants whose daughters learned the piano and whose salons needed music. There were public concerts, above all the academies of the Lenten season when the theatres closed for opera and instrumental music had the city to itself. There were publishers, copyists, instrument makers and two imperial theatres. What there was not was any mechanism for converting these scattered opportunities into a composer’s security: no copyright worth the name, no royalties on performance, no pension attached to merit, no agent, no savings bank habit among musicians, and credit only on personal security. H. C. Robbins Landon, the chronicler of Mozart’s Viennese setting, lays out this economy in detail: a rich city full of money for music, organised so that almost none of it could be relied on twice.

Mozart’s first eighteen months in the city were a demonstration of what the market could do at its best. He built a teaching practice among the aristocracy at high fees. He appeared as pianist in other men’s academies and then in his own. The German opera at the imperial theatre produced his Die Entführung aus dem Serail in July 1782, and its success ran through the German lands in a way that made his name current coin far beyond Vienna. He married, set up a household, and began to compose the piano concertos that would anchor his subscription seasons. For a run of years in the middle of the decade, the experiment looked less like a gamble than like the future arriving early. A generation later, Beethoven would work the same city on hybrid terms, keeping one foot in aristocratic patronage while selling to publishers, and the contrast between the two men’s arrangements is pursued in the account of Ludwig van Beethoven’s life and career. Mozart had no hybrid. He had the market, whole and unbuffered, and the phases of his career show what that meant in practice.

Phase	Approximate span	Where he lived	How he earned	What changed at the end of the phase
The managed childhood	1762 to 1769	Salzburg and the courts of Europe	Tour fees, gratuities and dedications, collected by his father	The children aged out of novelty and the tours wound down
The Italian apprenticeship	1769 to 1773	Milan, Bologna, Rome and Naples	Opera commissions and academy honours	He came home certified as an opera composer with no post to match
Salzburg court employment	1773 to 1781	Salzburg	A court salary as Konzertmeister, then as organist	The dismissal of 1781 ended the salaried life for good
Vienna, the building years	1781 to 1786	Vienna	Subscriptions, teaching, opera commissions and publishing	Success raised his standing and his household costs together
Vienna, the strained years	1787 to 1791	Vienna	A small court salary, commissions, concerts and loans	His death in December 1791 closed the experiment

How a freelance composer actually earned money

A freelance composer’s income in the Vienna of the 1780s was assembled, not received, and the assembly had at least six distinct pieces, each with its own rhythm and its own failure mode. There were fees for performing in other people’s concerts and for his own academies, which arrived in a rush during the Lenten season and then stopped. There was teaching, paid by the lesson or the month, dependable while the pupil’s enthusiasm lasted and terminable without notice. There were opera commissions, large single payments with nothing behind them, since a successful opera enriched its theatre and its publisher while its composer kept only the fee. There was publishing, which in the absence of effective copyright meant selling a work outright to a firm such as Artaria for a single sum, after which every copy sold in Europe belonged to the firm. There were dedications and presents from aristocratic patrons, generous and unpredictable in equal measure. And there were commissions for particular occasions, dances for the imperial ballrooms, serenades, arrangements, the small change of a working musician’s year.

Against this stood the fixed costs of being the kind of musician the market rewarded. A fashionable address, because pupils and patrons called at the house. A good fortepiano, maintained and moved. Servants, because a household receiving the aristocracy could not answer its own door. Copyists, because subscription concerts and opera rehearsals consumed parts by the hundredweight, and copying was charged by the sheet. Clothes, concerts given for the benefit of others, subscriptions to colleagues’ academies in the round of professional courtesy. The freelance life was not merely insecure. It was expensive in a way that scaled with success, since each rise in standing raised the cost of maintaining the appearance that standing required.

It is at this point that the question has to be opened which the rest of the financial story will answer, and it should be opened deliberately rather than answered in passing. Was he actually poor, or does the record say something else? The legend is confident: the genius died in poverty, neglected, his masterpieces unrecognised by a city that let him starve in plain sight. The documents are more troublesome than the legend, because they record earnings that no starving man ever saw, alongside debts that no prosperous man should have needed. Holding both facts at once requires the income to be examined year by year, which is the business of a later section of this article. For now the question stands open, with the machinery of the earnings laid out: six streams, all seasonal or terminable, financing a household whose costs were continuous. Whether that arithmetic ends in poverty or in something more precise is a matter the ledgers, when they are reached, will decide.

Subscription concerts and the academy system

The academy’s mechanics deserve a section of their own, because for three years they were the engine of the career. A composer who wished to give a concert for his own benefit in Vienna first rented or borrowed a room: the casino hall at the Mehlgrube, the rooms at the Trattnerhof, later the theatre at the Burgtheater on favourable nights. He then canvassed subscribers in person and by letter, because a subscription list was built out of relationships, and Mozart’s surviving subscription list from 1784, with 176 names drawn from the high aristocracy of the empire, shows how completely he had penetrated the paying class of the city within three years of arriving in it. The subscribers paid in advance for a series, usually of three concerts, which solved the composer’s cash problem at a stroke and explains the shape of his output: the piano concertos of 1784 to 1786, written at a rate of three to six a season, were composed to be performed by their composer at exactly these evenings, novelties manufactured for a subscription already sold.

The system had a hidden weakness that only time exposed. A subscription audience buys novelty and fashion as much as music, and both decay. The concerto that astonishes in 1784 is the expected thing by 1786, and the composer must outbid his own last season to hold the same list, while rivals, visiting virtuosos and the city’s appetite for opera compete for the same purses. Mozart’s academy income was at its height in the middle of the decade and fell away towards its end, not because Vienna had decided against his music, the operas and the piano teaching tell a different story, but because the Lenten concert market was a fashion market and fashion rotates. There was no annuity in it. Each spring the whole structure had to be rebuilt by personal canvass, and a spring in which the composer was ill, absent in Prague, or out of favour at two or three great houses could halve the year’s most reliable income at a blow.

What the academies gave him, while they lasted, was the closest thing the eighteenth century offered to a composer’s independence: a public that paid him directly, a repertory he controlled, and an instrument, his own piano playing, that no employer could assign to anyone else. Their decline is sometimes written as the beginning of neglect, and the documents support a narrower claim. The subscription system was a brilliant improvisation with a built-in expiry date, and the man who relied on it had built the most profitable part of his income on the least durable part of the market. The operas outlasted the academies. The debts outlasted both, because debts were the only part of the system with a memory.

Teaching, publishing and commissions

Teaching was the steadiest of the six streams and the one he liked least in its daily form, which is the usual fate of steady income. His pupils came from the houses that subscribed to his academies: daughters of officials and financiers, talented amateurs such as Josepha Auernhammer, for whom he wrote sonatas for two pianos and four hands, and Barbara Ployer, whose concertos written for her playing survive with his cadenzas attached. The fees were high by any contemporary standard, charged per lesson at rates that made a morning of teaching worth a week of Salzburg salary, and the work carried obligations beyond the keyboard: attendance at the pupil’s musical evenings, music supplied for the household, tact in unlimited quantities. Teaching also consumed the morning hours in which composition was easiest, a cost no ledger records and every composer’s correspondence complains about. Teachers who build lessons around such arrangements, showing how a composer of the period actually assembled a living, can open the resulting slides in a browser-based presentation viewer without installing specialist software.

Publishing paid worst relative to value, and the reason was legal rather than personal. With no enforceable copyright beyond a patchwork of local privileges, a work sold to a publisher was sold entire: the firm of Artaria in Vienna, and houses in Paris, London and Mainz that bought or simply took his music, set their own prices, printed at their own pace and owed him nothing after the single payment. Composers answered this with tactics rather than rights: withholding a work from sale while it earned in performance, selling the same piece in different cities, dedicating a set to a patron whose gift might exceed the publisher’s fee. Mozart used all of these, and owed some of his later difficulty to the arithmetic they produced, since a concerto kept back for his own academies was capital locked in a drawer, and a concerto sold was capital spent once. His own attempt to publish by subscription, offering sets of quartets and concertos directly to buyers, ran into the thinness of the same market that sustained his concerts.

Commissions were the stream with the longest reach. Beyond the operas stood work ordered from outside Vienna altogether: the quartets commissioned by the King of Prussia after the Berlin journey of 1789, the mechanical-organ pieces ordered by Count Deym for his gallery of curiosities, the music for Prague, for Frankfurt at the imperial coronation of 1790, for the suburban theatre that would dominate his last autumn. A commission was the healthiest form of freelance income, a fixed sum for defined work, but it arrived irregularly and it carried the buyer with it: the Prussian king expected cello parts a king could shine in, the coronation expected ceremony on a deadline, the theatre expected a score its company could perform. The portfolio was viable. That is the conclusion the machinery supports. Six streams, each workable, none guaranteed, and all of them dependent on the health, presence and fashion of one man: the portfolio was a structure with a single load-bearing member, and in a decade when a fever could remove that member for a month, the structure’s fragility was a matter of when, not whether.

Marriage to Constanze and the family’s objection

On arriving in Vienna in the spring of 1781, Mozart took lodgings where the road had prepared them: with the Weber family, transplanted from Mannheim, whose late father Fridolin had been a bass singer and the copyist whose hand had prepared the parts for half the music of that court. The eldest daughter Josepha sang; the second, Aloysia, was the soprano whose refusal at Munich had closed the journey of 1778; the third was Constanze, born in January 1762, trained to the piano and a serviceable voice in a household where music was the family trade. Mozart moved out when the arrangement began to be talked about, which was precisely too late to prevent the talk, and by the summer of 1782 he was engaged to Constanze under circumstances that included a written undertaking, extracted by her guardian, to marry her within three years or pay her a settlement. He tore up the paper when she returned it to him in trust, an episode the early biographies tell with relish and the documents support in outline.

Leopold’s objection to the marriage deserves its strongest statement, because it was not snobbery. The Webers were theatre people of irregular income and, in the father’s information, irregular habits; the mother drank; the daughters were, in the phrase the correspondence circles around, a family that lived by its wits in a trade Salzburg considered disreputable. Leopold also feared, correctly, that a wife and children would multiply the costs of the Vienna experiment at the moment of its greatest fragility, and he suspected, also correctly, that his remittances and rescue were being counted on as the experiment’s reserve. Against this stood his son’s case, made in letter after letter of mounting exasperation: he was twenty-six, he had kept himself in Vienna unassisted, the engagement was public enough that honour bound him, and Constanze was, as he wrote home in a description that mixes candour with advocacy, not beautiful but sensible, economical and fond of order. Both cases were rational. They were simply priced in different currencies, the father’s in security, the son’s in standing and desire.

The marriage took place on 4 August 1782 in St Stephen’s Cathedral, with a small company and without Leopold present. His written consent, dispatched from Salzburg after weeks of the son’s pleading, reached Vienna by post the day after the ceremony, a sequence the family’s later tellers embroidered and which the dates in the correspondence establish plainly enough. The couple’s first child was born the following June. Whatever the marriage became, and the household evidence suggests affection, disorder and endurance in proportions no biographer has finally settled, it began as the freelance experiment’s second wager, taken against advice by a man who had concluded that his father’s risk calculations, however sound, were calibrated to a life he had already refused. Nannerl’s relations with her sister-in-law were cold from the beginning, and the coldness matters later: the two women who controlled the family’s papers and its memory barely corresponded, and the biography has been paying for the estrangement ever since.

The household, the children and the losses

Six children were born to Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart between 1783 and 1791, and two survived infancy. The fact should be stated with its names attached, because the bare statistic is one of the points where the biography’s arithmetic does quiet damage. Raimund Leopold, the first, was born in June 1783 and died that August, while his father was away showing his new wife to Salzburg, a loss the letters register in a single controlled paragraph. Karl Thomas, born in September 1784, lived: he would become an official in Milan and survive until 1858, the keeper in old age of a famous name and a small, guarded archive. Johann Thomas Leopold, born in October 1786, died within the month. Theresia, born in December 1787, died the following June. Anna Maria, born in November 1789, died within hours of her birth. Franz Xaver Wolfgang, born in July 1791, five months before his father’s death, lived to become a professional composer and pianist, the only one of the family to attempt the trade again.

Four dead children in eight years was, by the demography of the period, an unexceptional toll, and the household’s surviving correspondence treats the losses with a brevity that modern readers can mistake for indifference. It was not indifference; it was the period’s grammar of grief, compressed into formulae because the alternative was unusable in a letter that also had to discuss money. What the record does show is the practical weight: pregnancies and confinements recurring through the very years when the household income was least predictable, doctors and nurses and wet-nurses to pay, a wife whose health after repeated childbearing was fragile enough to send her repeatedly to the waters at Baden at a cost the letters count carefully. The freelance portfolio had no provision for any of this. Each confinement was a season of reduced teaching and cancelled engagements arriving exactly when expenses peaked.

The household itself moved often, a dozen Viennese addresses in ten years, some chosen for cheapness and some for show, and the best documented of them, the apartment in the Schulerstrasse behind St Stephen’s where the family lived from 1784 to 1787, was a grand first-floor flat of the kind a fashionable teacher required, with room for two pianos and a billiard table listed in the estate inventory years later. Servants came and went; a cook, a maid, at times a manservant. The picture the inventory preserves is not destitution and not ease: a professional household spending at the level of its ambitions, equipped for the trade it plied, and carrying children, illness and rent through an income that arrived in lumps. The losses and the lodgings belong in the same account, because both were the overhead of the experiment, the cost of running a life and a business out of the same rooms.

The Sunday gatherings at van Swieten’s

Baron Gottfried van Swieten was prefect of the imperial library, son of Maria Theresa’s physician, and the most consequential amateur in Vienna: a man who had served as ambassador in Berlin, heard the music of the Bach sons at its source, and come home convinced that the learned counterpoint of the north was a discipline Viennese composers needed. On Sunday mornings at his rooms, a circle of musicians gathered to perform the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and the choral works of Handel from the Baron’s collection of manuscripts and prints, with van Swieten himself presiding over what amounted to a private academy of old music. Mozart, introduced in 1782, became the circle’s working pianist and arranger, and the encounter redirected the course of his writing: the fugues, the contrapuntal finales and the dense part-writing of his Viennese years begin at those Sunday desks. How the borrowed techniques changed the sound itself belongs to the companion account of Mozart’s musical style explained, which traces what the counterpoint did once it was absorbed.

The relationship ripened into employment of an unusual kind. Van Swieten was behind the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s concerts of oratorio, and between 1788 and 1790 Mozart reorchestrated four Handel works for those performances, Messiah among them, scoring them for modern winds and strings so that a Viennese audience could hear them at all. It was hack work at one level and an education at another: no composer learns a predecessor faster than by re-dressing his scores. The parallels with the older composer’s own career are instructive, and they are drawn out in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach and his salaried decades, where the documentation is thinner and the employment thicker, the mirror image of the Viennese case. Bach had an institution and a thin archive. Mozart had a rich archive and no institution. Van Swieten’s Sundays were the closest thing to an institution the freelance decade produced for him: unpaid, unguaranteed, and intellectually priceless.

There is a temptation to treat the gatherings as a hobby, and the record resists it. The Baron’s circle placed Mozart inside a network of high officials and serious amateurs whose subscriptions, commissions and intercessions recur throughout the decade: the Handel performances were public events with aristocratic backing, the library connection put rare scores in his hands, and van Swieten personally intervened in his affairs more than once, including after his death, when the Baron helped arrange support for the widow. In the economy of the freelance life, such a patron was worth more than a salary he never paid, because he connected the streams to one another. What he could not do was what no patron of the old type could any longer do in Vienna: guarantee the whole.

Haydn, friendship and the quartets

Joseph Haydn was twenty-four years Mozart’s senior, the Kapellmeister of the Esterházy princes, resident for most of the year at a palace in the Hungarian marshes, and by the early 1780s the most famous living composer in Europe. The two men met in Vienna in the winter of 1781 and 1782, played in string quartets together in the circle of amateurs that included the composers Dittersdorf and Vanhal, taking violin and viola parts as the evening required, and formed the one professional friendship of Mozart’s life conducted entirely between equals. Haydn heard the younger man’s work at closest quarters, in the room, on the desk, before publication. Mozart studied Haydn’s quartets with an attention his letters describe as long and laborious, and the six quartets he published in 1785, the fruit, as his dedication says, of that labour, were offered to Haydn in a printed dedication of a warmth composers did not usually print.

What Haydn said to Leopold, in Leopold’s own report of the visit of February 1785 when the last of the quartets were played through in the son’s rooms, has become the most quoted verdict of the century: he called Wolfgang, in the father’s rendering, “the greatest composer known to me by person and repute”. The words are quoted here as Leopold reported them, and their survival in his letter is itself part of the archive’s character: the manager recorded the endorsement as he would have recorded a fee, because in his economy an endorsement from Haydn was a fee. The friendship’s professional substance ran both ways. Haydn’s later quartets and symphonies absorbed lessons from the younger man’s harmony and operatic pacing, a debt Haydn acknowledged in conversation with a generosity that cost him nothing and that his biographers have sometimes found suspicious for exactly that reason. Neither man’s eminence was threatened by the other, which may be why the friendship is the least contested relationship in the biography.

Haydn sailed for London at the end of 1790, on the impresario Salomon’s contract, to the salaried adventure that would make his old age rich. The two composers parted in Vienna in December of that year and never met again; later accounts report that Mozart, taking leave, said they were probably saying their last farewell, and the sentence should be credited to the early biographical tradition rather than treated as a transcript. Haydn heard of his friend’s death in London and was, by his own later account to friends, inconsolable for days. For the biography the friendship matters as evidence about the Vienna decade itself: the experiment’s isolation is often overstated, and here is the counterweight, a working alliance with the one man alive whose judgement Mozart accepted without reservation. What it could not supply was money, or time. Haydn had the Esterházy roof over his quartets. The younger man had the market, and the market is the subject to which the life now returns.

The Figaro years and the collaboration with Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte was an Italian priest turned librettist, lately poet to the imperial theatre, clever, adaptable and in need of a success; Mozart in 1785 was in need of an Italian opera, the one credential his Viennese fame still lacked. Their first subject together was a provocation: Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, a play whose performances the Emperor had forbidden in Vienna for its insolence toward the aristocracy. Da Ponte’s memoirs, written in American exile decades later and burnishing their author at every turn, tell how he persuaded Joseph II to permit the opera by presenting the libretto with the politics trimmed and the wit intact. The memoirs are a performance and should be read as one, but the fact beneath the telling is solid: the opera was licensed, composed through the winter, and produced at the Burgtheater on 1 May 1786. Julian Rushton, the scholar whose work on Mozart’s operas sets the terms for how the Da Ponte collaborations are discussed, treats the partnership as a working alliance between two professionals who understood exactly what each was buying: the poet got music that made his verses immortal, and the composer got structures of a sophistication no other librettist in Vienna could supply.

The Vienna reception of Figaro was respectable and brief; the city preferred its novelties newer. Prague, that autumn, took the opera to its heart with an enthusiasm that reversed the composers’ fortunes, and the Prague impresario Bondini commissioned the next one for the following autumn. Don Giovanni was written through the summer of 1787, in part in Prague itself, and produced there in October. Così fan tutte, the third Da Ponte opera, followed at the Burgtheater in January 1790, its run interrupted by the death of Joseph II and the court’s mourning. As events in a life, the three collaborations mark the summit of the freelance decade’s possibilities: an imperial commission, a foreign triumph, a repertory. They also expose its limit, because the operas earned their composer fees and fame and no continuing income whatsoever, while the theatres that housed them, the publishers who printed them and the copyists who multiplied them all continued to be paid. The construction of the operas themselves, what the ensembles do and how the drama is carried in the music, is the subject of the catalogue of Mozart’s greatest compositions, and it is deliberately not retold here.

Collaboration was also a social fact, and the Da Ponte years placed Mozart at the centre of Vienna’s Italian theatrical world, with its singers’ factions, its intrigues over casting and its gossip reaching as far as the Emperor’s box. The documents show a composer fully engaged in that world: attending rehearsals, adjusting arias to voices, fighting for a singer he wanted. Nothing in the record supports the drawing-room image of a composer sealed away from the business of the stage. He was one of its operators, and the three operas were produced inside the same economy of fees, favours and fashion as everything else in the Vienna decade. When the imperial opera’s Italian company was wound down amid the war economy of 1790 and 1791, the structure that had carried the collaborations went with it, and the freelance composer’s most prestigious stream narrowed at exactly the moment when the others were failing too.

Prague and the audience that preferred him

Prague loved him with a completeness Vienna never matched, and the preference is a documented pattern rather than a traveller’s tale. When Figaro reached the Bohemian capital in the autumn of 1786 it ran and ran; its tunes were arranged for wind band, danced at balls, whistled, by contemporary report, in the streets. Mozart visited in January 1787, conducted the opera, gave an academy at which his new symphony, the one posterity calls the Prague, was performed, and signed the contract for Don Giovanni before he left. The premiere that October, at the Estates Theatre under Bondini’s company, was the most unambiguous triumph of his career, and Prague remembered it. His friendships in the city were working ones: with the impresario Pasquale Bondini and his successor Domenico Guardasoni, and with the singer Josepha Duschek and her husband Franz Xaver, at whose villa above the city he stayed and for whom he wrote concert scenes.

The reasons for the preference repay a biographer’s attention, because they illuminate the Vienna problem by contrast. Prague was a provincial capital with a proud Estates theatre and a smaller, more stable audience: a success there entered the repertory and stayed, generating the repeat performances, the local pride and the personal loyalty that Vienna’s faster market dissolved within a season. The Bohemian musical culture was also famously deep, its church and school training producing orchestral players in numbers out of proportion to the city’s size, and a composer was judged there by musicians as much as by fashion. Mozart’s Prague earnings were not large by Viennese subscription standards. What Prague paid in was durability, and durability was the one currency the freelance life could not mint at home.

The city’s loyalty closed the story as well as crowned it. In September 1791, three months before his death, Mozart was in Prague for the last time, conducting the coronation opera La clemenza di Tito, written on commission for the crowning of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, and revisiting the Duscheks and the theatre of his triumph while already unwell and overworked. Tito was received respectfully and without the old fire, a court commission executed at speed for a court occasion. The Prague that had kept Figaro alive for five years would keep his memory with the same fidelity: the first substantial biography, Niemetschek’s, was written by a Prague professor who had known him there, and it appeared under Prague’s patronage in 1798. The audience that preferred him became, in the end, his first biographer, which may be the most Prague-like outcome imaginable: the loyalty was converted, once again, into work.

The income question and what the records show

Was Mozart poor when he died?

No, on the documents. His best Viennese years brought earnings matching senior court officials’ salaries, an imperial appointment from 1787, and fees from opera, teaching and concerts; against these stand debts at death of about two thousand florins and an income that arrived in lumps. Indebted and illiquid is what the evidence supports. Destitute is what it contradicts.

The shape of the evidence is this. In the strongest years, 1784 to 1786, the subscription academies, the teaching and the commissions together produced an income that Solomon, working from the surviving lists, contracts and letters, estimates as rivalling the pay of the higher civil service: several thousand florins a year at the peak, against the 450 florins of the Salzburg organist post and the 800 florins a year of the imperial chamber composer’s appointment he accepted in December 1787, a post that had carried 2,000 florins for Gluck and was offered to Mozart at the reduced figure because the treasury was economising. The appointment is itself the cleanest single datum in the whole dispute. The court of Joseph II did not give salaried posts, however diminished, to neglected failures; it gave them to the composer it expected to write its dances and be seen at its occasions. What the salary bought Mozart was not riches but ballast: 800 florins a year that arrived whether the Lenten season succeeded or not, the first guaranteed money of the freelance decade, accepted, significantly, six years into the experiment.

Then the cycle turned, and the records show the turn with the same clarity. Austria’s war with the Ottoman Empire, running from 1788 into 1791, drained the aristocracy that subscribed, taught and commissioned: regiments absorbed the young men, war taxes absorbed the incomes, and the great houses economised or left for their estates. Subscription lists shrank. The imperial opera retrenched. The same portfolio that had produced several thousand florins in a fat year now produced a fraction of it, while the household’s costs, set at the level of the fat years and swollen by illness and the Baden cures, did not shrink in step. At his death the estate papers listed debts on the order of two thousand florins, and against them a household inventoried in detail: furniture, clothes, a fortepiano, a billiard table, music and unpaid claims on others. A pauper’s estate is not inventoried like that. A stretched professional’s estate is.

So the question opened in the discussion of the freelance machinery can now be closed, and the fourth rung of the argument lands with it. The financial record shows a high income and a cash-flow problem, not poverty, which inverts the usual story. He was not an unrecognised genius starving in a garret; he was a successful, expensive, fully employed professional whose income was large, irregular and pro-cyclical, collapsing in the same years his expenses peaked, in an economy that offered a man in his position no insurance, no credit market and no pension. Poverty is a condition of having too little. Mozart’s condition was having plenty, in the wrong months, with rent due in all of them. The legend preferred the simpler story, and the reasons the legend preferred it belong to the sections on the making of the myth. The ledgers, which are the subject here, are unambiguous about the arithmetic even where they leave the man arguable.

The borrowing letters and what they actually say

The borrowing letters are the most quoted documents in the biography and the most carelessly read. They run from 1788 to 1791 and they are addressed, almost without exception, to one man: Michael Puchberg, a textile merchant, a fellow Freemason from Mozart’s lodge, and the friend who functioned, in the absence of banks that lent to musicians, as his creditor of resort. Read in sequence, as Eisen’s edition of the correspondence allows them to be read, the letters show a pattern quite unlike the abjection of the legend. They are businesslike in structure even when anxious in tone: a specific sum requested, a specific expected receipt named against it, a specific date proposed for repayment. A subscription payment is awaited, a commission is in negotiation, a publisher is slow. The sums are itemised across the years into a total of roughly 1,400 florins, and partial repayments are recorded among the requests, which is not how a man writes to a patron he is fleecing; it is how a man writes to a lender he intends to keep.

The circumstances the letters name are specific, and that specificity is the point that quotation usually strips away. They belong to the war years, when the subscription income failed; to the months of Constanze’s illnesses at Baden, when medical and lodging costs ran ahead of every receipt; and to the gap between finishing work and being paid for it, the oldest gap in a freelance life. They do not belong to a career-long condition: there are no such letters from the fat years of 1784 to 1786, because there was no gap to bridge. There is one other documented loan with a harder edge, the sum advanced by Prince Karl Lichnowsky around the Berlin journey of 1789, which ended, after Mozart’s death, in a court judgement against his estate when the prince sued for repayment; the court papers survive and show the transaction as a loan formally made and formally recovered. Even the hardest case, in other words, reads as credit extended to a professional and enforced as credit, not as charity refused to a beggar.

Here the fifth rung lands. The borrowing letters were written to one lender in a specific circumstance and have been read far beyond what they support. Detached from Puchberg, from the war economy and from the repayment record, a sentence or two of Mozart’s most pressing prose became the documentary foundation for the poverty myth, the proof text produced whenever the garret is required. Restored to their file, the letters prove something narrower and more valuable: that the freelance system, at its point of failure, had exactly one shock absorber, a friend’s purse, and that the man who had built the system knew its weakness precisely and said so, in so many words, to the person carrying the risk with him. Constanze, after his death, settled with the creditors as the estate allowed and treated Puchberg’s forbearance as a debt of honour, which is the behaviour of a household that understood its obligations as real. The myth needed a pauper. The letters describe a borrower. The difference is the whole financial biography in miniature.

The last two years and the volume of work

The output of 1790 and 1791 refutes, on its own, the picture of a composer fading into neglect. Così fan tutte opened in January 1790. Through that year came the final string quartets of the Prussian commission, the last piano concerto in January 1791, the string quintet in E flat that spring, the little opera of the suburban theatre and the coronation opera for Prague in the single autumn of 1791, the clarinet concerto for Anton Stadler in October, a Masonic cantata in November, and the Ave verum for a village choir at Baden in June, a miniature written for a friend’s feast day in the middle of the largest workload of his life. The work was not the residue of a career. It was a career at full stretch, for buyers who were still buying: the court, the Prussian king, the Estates of Bohemia, a suburban impresario, a clarinettist, a lodge, a schoolmaster. Neglect does not produce a diary like that.

The volume carried its own cost, legible in the letters of the final summer. Constanze was at Baden for much of it, taking the waters through another pregnancy; Franz Xaver was born there in July. Mozart wrote to her almost daily, letters full of domestic comedy, requests for news, irritation at her company-keeping and reports of work finished at speed. He travelled to Frankfurt in the autumn of 1790 for the coronation of Leopold II, hoping for court notice and finding little, and to Prague in September 1791 for the second coronation and Tito, a commission executed in a matter of weeks on a journey he made while already complaining of unwellness. Through all of it, from the summer of 1791 onward, one further commission sat on his desk under a condition of secrecy, and the life has now reached the point where its strangest document must be introduced, though the whole of its answer belongs to the section after next. A stranger had come to his door with an offer no composer refuses and a condition no composer enjoys: a large fee for a major work, half paid in advance, the buyer unnamed, the purpose unstated, the score to be delivered finished and claimed by nobody. Who commissioned the Requiem, and why did it have to stay secret? The question opened in that summer, and Mozart worked at the score with the question still hanging over the house, which is how the next sections must take it up: first the opera that filled his last autumn in public, then the commission that filled it in private.

The Magic Flute and the suburban theatre

The Theater auf der Wieden stood outside the city walls in the suburb of Wieden, a wooden house seating around a thousand, run by Emanuel Schikaneder: actor, singer, impresario and an old acquaintance from Salzburg days who knew exactly which public he served. His company played German Singspiel, plays with music, spectacle and machinery, to an audience of artisans, servants, minor officials and their families, the public the court theatres ignored. In the spring of 1791 Schikaneder brought Mozart a libretto in that line, a fairy-tale rescue piece with serpents, enchanted instruments and a priesthood of solemn trials, and the two men set to work in the garden house by the theatre through the summer. Die Zauberflöte was produced there on 30 September 1791, with Schikaneder himself as the birdcatcher Papageno and Mozart conducting from the keyboard for the first performances.

As an event in the life, the premiere is the freelance system’s answer to its critics. This was not court patronage and not aristocratic subscription. It was a commercial house selling tickets to a suburban public, a run, in the event, that extended for years and made the opera the widest popular success of his lifetime, and it was achieved with the machinery of the market he had bet on in 1781: an impresario with a theatre, a company with a following, a piece built for its audience and receipts counted nightly. His letters to Constanze at Baden that October report the house’s takings and the audience’s behaviour with a working professional’s pride; he describes creeping into the box incognito to hear his own opera and being delighted by the parts the crowd relished. The experiment of the freelance decade, so often pronounced dead by the poverty legend, was visibly alive and profitable in his final autumn, in the least prestigious theatre he ever wrote for.

The Masonic elements woven through the libretto, the trials by fire and water, the brotherhood of the temple, belong in part to the debate over the opera’s meanings, and their analysis belongs elsewhere in this series. For the life, the relevant facts are plainer: Mozart had been a lodge brother since 1784, Schikaneder was one too, and the opera’s solemn strand spoke a language its first audience’s better-informed members recognised. What the life records, in the end, is simultaneity. In the same eight weeks he conducted a popular triumph in a wooden suburban theatre, fulfilled a state commission for a coronation in Prague, wrote a concerto for a clarinettist friend and worked in private on a mass for the dead whose buyer he did not know. No salaried court composer in Europe carried a portfolio like it. It was the freelance experiment at its maximum extent, and it was being run, by the autumn of 1791, by a man whose body had begun to refuse the load.

The Requiem commission

The commission arrived in the summer of 1791 in the form the early accounts agree on: an unknown messenger, a letter without a signature, an offer of fifty ducats with half paid down, and questions deflected. The composer was to write a requiem mass, at his own pace, and to ask nothing about the person or the purpose behind the order. Mozart accepted, began the work between his other obligations, and spoke about it to Constanze and to friends with the half-joking unease that the early biographies report; the score grew through the autumn in the gaps of the Prague journey and the Flute’s run. The question left open earlier in this article can now be answered outright, and the answer is more ordinary and more revealing than the mystery that replaced it. The buyer was Franz, Count von Walsegg-Stuppach, a landowner of Stuppach in Lower Austria and a passionate amateur musician, and the requiem was intended for the memorial of his wife Anna, who had died that February at the age of twenty.

Walsegg’s habit, documented by his contemporaries and by the scores that survive in his library, was to commission works from professional composers and then perform them at his estate as his own compositions, copying out the parts in his own hand and keeping the authorship a parlour secret among his musicians. The secrecy of the Mozart commission was therefore not sinister and not supernatural. It was the condition of the fraud, if fraud is not too strong a word for a vanity the count’s circle seems to have connived at: the work had to arrive without a name because the name it would carry was the count’s. The anonymity that generated two centuries of grey messengers and death omens was a clause in a commercial arrangement, inserted to protect an amateur’s pretence. The freelance market had produced many strange contracts. This was the strangest, and its strangeness has been systematically misread as fate ever since.

What Mozart left, when he died in the middle of the work, was a score complete in its conception and incomplete in its execution: the opening Introit finished in his hand in full score, the Kyrie and most of the Sequence and Offertory drafted in the compressed form from which he habitually worked, with the vocal lines and the bass complete and the instrumentation sketched or implied, and the remaining movements unwritten. Constanze, who needed the balance of the fee and feared the count would reclaim the advance if the work came back unfinished, arranged its completion quietly: first by Joseph Eybler, who began the task and returned it, defeated by the responsibility or the difficulty, and then by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Mozart’s pupil and assistant, who finished the score in a hand practised at imitating his master’s and delivered it complete. Walsegg performed the requiem at Wiener Neustadt in December 1793 as his own work, at his wife’s memorial, exactly as planned. The commission’s afterlife as a controversy about authorship belongs to the catalogue of the works; in the life, it stands as the last and most characteristic transaction of the freelance decade: a masterpiece bought anonymously, left unfinished by death, and finished by a pupil so that a widow could be paid.

The final illness

He came back from Prague in the middle of September 1791 in poor health and worked on regardless: the Flute’s run to attend, the clarinet concerto to finish, the little Masonic cantata to conduct in November. In the last week of November he took to his bed in the flat in the Rauhensteingasse. The illness, as his sister-in-law Sophie Haibl described it in a letter written decades later for the Nissen biography, brought swelling of the hands and feet and a fever that confined him entirely; he was attended by Dr Thomas Franz Closset, a respected Viennese physician, and by the family, with Süssmayr at the bedside helping him go over the unfinished Requiem in his final days, an episode the early accounts report and which should be read as theirs. He died on 5 December 1791, shortly before one in the morning, aged thirty-five.

How did Mozart die?

He died after a short feverish illness that confined him to bed for two weeks. The register of St Stephen’s recorded the cause as a severe miliary fever, a symptom label of the period, not a modern diagnosis. Later writers proposed many underlying diseases, from rheumatic fever to kidney failure, and none can be proved.

The register entry deserves its weight and no more. The terminology of 1791 described what a sickroom showed: a burning fever with a miliary rash, the Friesel of the entry, and physicians of the period filed many different underlying diseases under it. The retrospective diagnoses offered since, rheumatic inflammatory fever in the influential twentieth-century versions, kidney disease, streptococcal infection, poisoning by medication, are arguments from a symptom list recorded by laypeople, and they cannot rise above the evidence that supports them, which is thin. The responsible statement is the narrow one: a man of thirty-five, exhausted by overwork and by the infections of a pre-antibiotic city, died of an acute febrile illness in the winter of 1791. Anything more precise is conjecture wearing a white coat, and this article will not wear it.

About the allegation that has attached itself to the death, the biography owes the reader precision rather than drama. Decades after the event, a story entered print holding that Antonio Salieri, the imperial court composer and Mozart’s senior colleague in the Viennese opera world, had poisoned his rival. The categories must be kept apart, because collapsing them is how the story lives. The claim was alleged in gossip and in an old man’s reported ramblings, dramatised by poets and playwrights, and never charged by any authority, never tested in any proceeding, and supported by no contemporary document of any kind. The documented relationship between the two men was that of professional competitors in a small court economy, with the frictions that implies and with recorded courtesies as well. The full archaeology of the allegation belongs to the debate over Mozart’s standing; here it is enough to fix its evidentiary status in the record of the life, which is nil. He died, on all the evidence there is, of being ill in 1791, which killed men of every profession and every degree of genius without assistance.

The burial and the common grave

The burial arrangements were made by Constanze with the help of van Swieten, and they were modest in the ordinary way: a third-class funeral, a blessing at St Stephen’s, and burial at the cemetery of St Marx, outside the city wall, where Viennese burials had been directed since the burial reforms of the Emperor Joseph II in 1784. Those reforms, enacted across the monarchy in a spirit of rational hygiene, prescribed the system under which Mozart was buried and under which most of Vienna was buried beside him: interment in suburban cemeteries rather than churchyards, in common graves shared by several coffins, without individual monuments, the graves to be reopened and reused after a period of years. The prescriptions had been resisted, modified and absorbed by 1791, but the common grave and the unmarked plot remained the standard treatment for the city’s middling dead, the class of burial a professional family could afford and the class the law expected.

Why was Mozart buried in an unmarked grave?

Because the Josephine burial reforms made the unmarked common grave the standard Viennese provision: burial in a suburban cemetery, in a shared grave without a monument, the plot to be reused after some years. Wealthier citizens received the same treatment under the same rules. The unmarked grave was not a pauper’s disposal nor a mark of neglect.

The shareable fact of this article, the one a reader can carry away and check, is the burial fact stated whole. Mozart was not buried in a pauper’s grave. The unmarked communal burial was ordinary practice for most Vienna citizens under the Josephine burial reforms, and wealthier contemporaries received the same. A pauper in 1791 was buried at parish expense without service or record of the kind Mozart received; Mozart was buried with a church blessing, a recorded funeral class and a grave in the city’s appointed ground, shared because sharing was the rule. That is the sixth and final rung of the argument, and it is the rebuttal the whole financial record has been building toward: the grave that posterity reads as the city’s verdict on his worth was in fact a municipal regulation, applied to a man whose estate, debts and all, was that of a working professional and not of an outcast. The regulation, not the reputation, dug the grave.

Two later ornaments of the story can be dismissed from the same documents. The desolate funeral of legend, a handful of mourners turning back at the city gate in a storm of rain and snow while the coffin went on alone, is not supported by any contemporary account, and the Viennese weather records for 6 December 1791 describe a mild, calm day. And the later loss of the grave’s exact position, which reads to romantics as the final indignity, follows mechanically from the system itself: a common grave reopened and reused after its term, in a cemetery whose plots carried no permanent markers, could not remain findable for the widow who came looking in earnest nearly two decades later, as Constanze did, by which time the ground had done what the regulations designed it to do. The scandal of the burial was manufactured by a later century that had forgotten its own grandfathers had been buried the same way, and needed the grave to mean something about genius and the world. It means something plainer. It means the freelance had no institution to bury him grandly, and the municipality buried him as it buried everyone.

Constanze as widow, editor and estate manager

Constanze Mozart was twenty-nine years old in December 1791, with two sons aged seven years and four months, debts on the order of two thousand florins, no salary, no pension in place, and one substantial asset: a roomful of manuscripts by the most employable dead composer in Europe, including an unfinished requiem that a count believed he had bought entire. Her conduct over the following decade is the final piece of evidence in the argument of this article, because she proceeded to run the freelance portfolio, posthumously and alone, better than the circumstances of any comparable widow of the period would predict. She petitioned the Emperor for a pension and received a modest one, 266 florins a year. She organised benefit concerts for herself and her children, in Vienna and on tour in German cities, performing her husband’s music as its living advertisement. And she managed the manuscripts as capital, which is what they were.

The steps were taken in an order that shows the strategy. The Requiem was completed and delivered, securing the fee and creating the work around which the posthumous reputation would first crystallise; a copy reached the count, another stayed with her, and the score entered the world’s repertory under her management of its early editions. In 1799 and 1800 she sold the bulk of the autograph manuscripts to the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton André for a substantial sum, a transaction that put the originals into a single professional custody and paid her as no Viennese publisher of the 1780s would have paid the living composer for the same paper. She dealt with Breitkopf and Härtel over the projected complete edition. She corrected, promoted and defended. The hostile reading of Constanze, assembled by nineteenth-century writers who preferred the widow careless and the sister-in-law wronged, holds that she neglected the grave, dissipated the legacy and understood nothing of the music; the documentary record of contracts, petitions and concert accounts supports instead a woman of considerable business competence operating a difficult estate in a market she had watched her husband fail to stabilise. Between the readings, the contracts are the harder evidence, and they are hers.

In 1809 she married Georg Nikolaus Nissen, a Danish diplomat who had lodged in her Vienna house and who devoted his retirement to the biography of her first husband, published in 1828 with her cooperation and built on the family’s papers, which she edited for publication with the protectiveness of a woman who had been traduced in print before and intended to control the record this time. She died in Salzburg in 1842, fifty years a widow of Mozart and thirty-three years a wife and then widow of Nissen, having outlived the legend’s first draft and supervised its second. The freelance experiment did not end in the Rauhensteingasse in December 1791. It ended, insofar as it ended at all, in ledgers like the ones Leopold kept, kept this time by the widow who understood, as the legend never has, that the papers were the estate.

The first biographies and where the legend starts

The documented life had barely ended when the legend began its work, and the two can be watched separating, because the first biographical accounts appeared within seven years of the death and were written by men working from the family’s own materials. Friedrich Schlichtegroll’s necrology, published in 1793 in a Gotha almanac of the notable dead, drew its Salzburg material from the family itself, channelled through the court councillor Schachtner and Nannerl; it gave the childhood its anecdotal shape, the tiny violin, the covered keyboard, the accuracy that shamed professionals, drawn from living memory and already polished in the telling. Franz Xaver Niemetschek’s biography, printed at Prague in 1798, was the first book, built on Constanze’s papers and the Prague circle’s recollections, and it fixed the counter-image: the neglected master, the ungrateful city, the death in poverty, the grave untended. Between the Salzburg childhood of wonders and the Prague martyrology, the factual skeleton of the life was complete by 1800. Everything since has been commentary, correction, or embroidery on those two originals.

The embroidery followed laws of its own. An early death invites a story-shaped life, and the machinery by which a culture converts a thirty-five-year-old’s death into a parable of genius against the world is examined at length in the series survey of musicians who died too young; Mozart’s case became the template from which the parable was cut. The poisoning allegation gathered print in the 1820s as Salieri, aged, ill and confined, was reported to have accused himself, reports his attendants contradicted and no document supports. The burial acquired its storm. The finances acquired their garret. Each addition answered a need of the audience rather than a gap in the record: the nineteenth century, which was professionalising music and building its concert halls and conservatories, required a founding martyr, a genius the old order had failed, so that the new order could define itself as the one that would have known better. The argument over how much of that story survives the documents is the standing dispute about his standing, and it is conducted on its own ground in the Mozart legacy debate.

Against the embroidery stood the documents, accumulating quietly. The letters were published, trimmed and improving, through the nineteenth century, and in scholarly completeness only in the twentieth. The autographs Constanze sold to André were catalogued and collated. The estate papers, the subscription lists, the court records and the burial regulations were read as evidence rather than atmosphere, until the biography reached its modern condition: a life in which the legend’s load-bearing claims, the poverty, the pauper’s grave, the poisoned cup, can each be traced to their first appearance in print and weighed against records that were always there. The legend started where the documents were not yet being read. It survives wherever they still are not, which is a comment about readership rather than about Mozart.

Nannerl’s later testimony

The most valuable witness to the childhood was also the most compromised, and her testimony needs a section of its own because so much of the early record passes through her. Maria Anna Mozart, widowed in 1801 and teaching piano in Salzburg on a narrow income, was the family’s memory: she had been there for everything before 1769, had kept a diary during part of the touring years whose entries survive, and held family papers that no one else possessed. When Schlichtegroll prepared his necrology in 1792, the Salzburg material reached him through Schachtner, the trumpeter and family friend, who wrote down the famous childhood anecdotes, the boy recognising pitches, the duet played with the keyboard covered, at her instance and from her recollection. The anecdotes are therefore testimony at one remove: a sister’s memory, a friend’s pen, a biographer’s almanac. They are not inventions, and they are not transcripts, and the biography goes wrong whenever it treats them as either.

Her own voice reaches the record late and mediated. In 1829, the year of her death, the English musicians Vincent and Mary Novello travelled to Salzburg to interview her, and their diaries record an old lady of seventy-eight, blind since the middle of that decade, precise and guarded by turns, still protective of the family’s version and still, in small ways, settling the account of 1781: the brother had been difficult, the father had been right to worry, the wife had been a stranger to the family’s standards. Halliwell, whose reading of the household governs how these materials are used here, treats the Novello interviews as the last dispatch from inside the firm: loyal, partial and irreplaceable. She died that October, and with her died the last person who had stood on the chair-side of the story, watching the audiences watch her brother.

The guardedness had a cost the biography still pays. Nannerl kept things back, destroyed or withheld papers whose absence scholars note without being able to remedy, and shaped the childhood material toward the family’s dignity, as was her right and her habit. Her brother’s Vienna decade, the decade that matters most to the argument of this article, she knew only at a distance and partly through report, and her testimony about it is thin where the letters of father and son are thick. The childhood is over-documented through her and the adulthood is under-documented without her, and the resulting imbalance, a life whose first fifteen years are known by the week and whose last ten must be rebuilt from accounts and contracts, is not an accident of survival. It is the shape left by the witnesses: a sister who remembered the firm, and a widow who kept the receipts of its successor.

What the letters do and do not tell us

The correspondence is the spine of everything written about this life, and it should be read with a clear sense of what kind of object a letter is. Leopold’s letters home from the tours are reports to a business partner: they price, they justify, they manage the recipient’s opinion of decisions already taken. Wolfgang’s letters are performances calibrated to their reader. To his father he is, by turns, the dutiful son, the exasperated professional and the penitent borrower, sometimes within a single page. To his cousin at Augsburg he is a verbal acrobat whose jokes, scatology and wordplay the nineteenth-century editors suppressed and the modern editions restore. To Constanze in 1791 he is domestic, teasing and worried about her health and her company. None of these voices is the unmediated man. Each is the man writing, which is a different and, for a biographer, a more honest category: the letters show what he wanted each reader to believe, and the pattern across the wants is the closest approach to character the evidence allows.

Eisen’s edition of the letters in English, with its apparatus of dates, recipients and circumstances, is the instrument that makes this kind of reading possible, and its standard is the one this article has followed: a letter is evidence for what was written, to whom, on what occasion, and only then for what was true. The survival of the correspondence is itself uneven in ways that bias every biography built on it. The tours are documented because Hagenauer kept Leopold’s reports. The Vienna decade is documented largely from Wolfgang’s letters to his father until 1787, and then, after Leopold’s death, from the Puchberg file and the letters to Constanze, which survive in part and were edited by their keeper before scholars saw them. Whole categories of paper, account books, drafts of contracts, the household’s day-to-day records, are gone. The archive is rich and it is not representative, and the confidence of this article’s financial sections rests not on the letters’ charm but on the drier survivals, inventories, lists and court papers, that check them. Readers building their own notes across a correspondence of this scale, testing one letter against another over years of reading, can keep those notes offline and encrypted through the app obtained on the VaultBook download page, which suits a paper trail that is itself full of gaps and guarded passages.

What the letters cannot settle should be named plainly, because they are so often asked to settle it. They cannot tell us what the music meant to him, and their few attempts at aesthetic statement are either jokes or negotiations. They cannot measure the marriage, whose surviving correspondence is one-sided and partly destroyed. They cannot resolve the Leopold question, because both parties to that correspondence were advocates in it. And they cannot, for all their density, give the biography a voice for the years when it most needs one, the final months, where the record narrows to dates, receipts and other people’s recollections. The letters are the real inheritance’s largest item, but an inheritance is not the man. It is what the man, and the firm around him, happened to file.

The documentary record as the real inheritance

From 1784 Mozart kept a catalogue of his own works, a neat manuscript book in which he entered each new piece with its date, its occasion and an opening incipit of its music. The habit has no real parallel among the great composers before him, and it is the freelance experiment in miniature: no institution was keeping his record, so he kept it himself, in the same spirit in which his father had kept the receipts. Around that catalogue the rest of the documentary inheritance arranges itself: the autograph scores Constanze sold to André, the estate inventory, the subscription lists, the publishing contracts, the court appointment decree, the burial register, the weather diary that clears the funeral of its storm. It is an unusually actionable inheritance. The downstream question is what the world’s musicians did with the music once it was theirs, and that story, of pupils, imitators and the long reshaping of his reputation in sound, is told in the account of Mozart’s influence on music.

The inheritance’s Viennese chapter is the one the life can close itself. The generation that learned from the surviving scores at first hand was the generation of the city’s next master: Franz Schubert, born six years after Mozart died, educated in the Vienna where Mozart’s operas were repertory and his scores were print, taught composition by Salieri himself in the final irony of that slandered name, and buried, when his own short life ended, in a grave near Beethoven’s in Währing with a stone that called him a possessor of rich musical treasure. The full account of that inheritance belongs to the life of Franz Schubert and his music. What matters for the biography is the mechanism: the freelance left no institution behind him, no chapel, no school, no salaried successor, and yet the work propagated, because the documents and the scores were sound enough to carry it. The paper outlived the payroll. It usually does, when the paper is good.

There is a final sense in which the record is the inheritance, and it concerns the reader of this article rather than the composers. Every generation of the legend has been built by writers who had the documents available and preferred the story. Every correction has been built by writers who went back to the same documents and read them slower. The record does not change; the reading does, and the record’s completeness is precisely what makes the corrections possible and the legend inexcusable in proportion as it persists. A life this well filed imposes a discipline on its tellers. The discipline is the inheritance too.

Mozart life and career: a career with no model to follow

The thesis can now be restated with the evidence assembled behind it. Mozart was the first major composer to attempt a career without a permanent patron, and the strangeness of his last decade resolves, on inspection, into the ordinary frictions of an extraordinary experiment. The income was real and the debts were real, because the market that paid him paid in lumps and the life he had to maintain charged by the month. The output was enormous and the exhaustion was real, because every stream in the portfolio ran through one man’s hands and health. The end was early and its circumstances were plain: an illness, a common grave under general regulations, a widow with papers. Nothing in the life requires a villain, a conspiracy or a miracle to explain it. It requires a market that had not finished being invented, and a man who declined to wait for it.

The comparison that frames the whole is the one between the two childhoods of the archive: the salaried Bach, whose life the institutions documented, and the freelance Mozart, whose life the family firm documented, passing through the Sunday mornings at van Swieten’s where the second studied the first as a technology for surviving without a chapel. The wider map of that transition, from chapel and court to the open market that Haydn’s London journeys and Beethoven’s annuity would soon be navigating with better instruments, is drawn in the survey of classical composers and their history, and this life is its central case study. Haydn escaped the old system at sixty with an impresario’s contract. Beethoven entered the new one with patrons guaranteeing his income while he sold to publishers. Mozart ran the experiment first, at twenty-five, with no contract, no annuity and no net, and the experiment’s results are written across the subscription lists, the borrowing letters and the estate inventory for anyone to audit.

What would have had to exist for the experiment to succeed outright is not a romantic question, and it closes the biography on the structural note its subject’s century deserves. Copyright in performance and print, so that Figaro’s European career paid its composer and not only its theatres. A credit market that lent against future earnings rather than against a friend’s signature. A pension or insurance mechanism for a profession whose entire capital walked around in one body. A concert life with seasons rather than fashions. Most of these arrived within two generations, and the composers who used them stood, knowingly or not, on the evidence of the Vienna decade: the demonstration, conducted at full cost by the best-documented musician of the century, that the talent was never the problem. The market was the problem, and the market, unlike the man, got to learn from the experiment and continue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptised Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a composer and performer born in Salzburg in 1756 who became the most thoroughly documented musician of his century. Trained by his father Leopold, a leading violin pedagogue, he toured Europe as a child performer, served the Archbishop of Salzburg through his teens, and in 1781 resigned that service to attempt something no major composer had tried: a career in Vienna with no permanent patron, assembled from concerts, teaching, publishing and commissions. In the single decade that followed he produced the operas, concertos and chamber works on which his reputation rests, earned and spent a large irregular income, and died in December 1791, aged thirty-five, leaving an unfinished requiem and an archive of letters and accounts unmatched for a musician of his time.

Q: When and where was Mozart born?

Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, in the prince-archbishopric of that name in the Holy Roman Empire, and was baptised the following day in Salzburg Cathedral. The family lived on the third floor of a house on the Getreidegasse, in rooms rented from a merchant household, and he remained a Salzburg subject, however far he travelled, until his break with the archbishop’s service in 1781 made him a resident of Vienna in practice. His birth name joined his grandfather’s, his saint’s day name, and Theophilus, rendered in his own usage as Amadeus; the Wolfgang by which the world knows him came from his maternal grandfather. Salzburg shaped everything that followed: it gave him his training ground, his first employment and his father’s career, and its smallness gave him the reason to leave.

Q: How did Leopold Mozart train his children?

Leopold Mozart trained his children by system rather than by inspiration, and the system can be reconstructed because he had published its principles in his violin treatise of 1756, one of the standard pedagogical works of the German Enlightenment. Both Nannerl and Wolfgang began at the keyboard in earliest childhood, with daily supervised practice, graded exercises and constant correction. Composition was taught as a craft progresses in a workshop: the boy’s earliest pieces were entered in his sister’s notebook, his first sonatas and symphonies carry completions and corrections in his father’s hand, and the adult supervision thinned only as the pupil’s own hand grew reliable. Performance was the final stage of each lesson, with the European tours serving as examinations before paying audiences. The result confounds the usual choice between prodigy and product: the aptitude was extraordinary, and it was met by the most competent, deliberate training available anywhere in Europe.

Q: What happened to Mozart’s sister Nannerl?

Maria Anna Mozart, called Nannerl, was a keyboard player of professional standing who shared the billing on the family’s tours and drew praise from reviewers in Paris, London and Vienna for playing of finished accomplishment. Her public career ended in her late teens, not through any failure of ability but because a daughter of her station was expected to withdraw from performance and prepare for marriage; she remained in Salzburg, taught piano to local pupils, and in 1784 married a widowed magistrate, Johann Baptist von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, settling at St Gilgen. Widowed in 1801, she returned to Salzburg, taught again, and became the family’s chief living memory, supplying recollections for the first necrology and receiving the English musicians Vincent and Mary Novello for interviews in 1829. She died in Salzburg that October, thirty-eight years after her brother, the last survivor of the touring family.

Q: Why did the Mozart family tour Europe?

The tours served four purposes at once, and the family pursued all of them consciously. They earned money, in performance fees, gratuities and the sale of the children’s printed sonatas, at a rate the Salzburg salary could never approach. They advertised, planting the children’s names in the courts and capitals of Europe so that posts, pupils and patrons could be solicited later from a position of fame. They educated, exposing the young composer to the French manner at Versailles, the Italian style in London, the great Mannheim orchestra and the opera houses of Italy, an apprenticeship no single city could have provided. And they searched, without success in Leopold’s lifetime, for the grand appointment that would convert a travelling attraction into a settled future. The tours also generated the letters and accounts that make this childhood the best documented of the century, because a business that lives on the road reports home or goes under.

Q: What was Mozart’s job in Salzburg?

Mozart’s Salzburg employment was court service to the prince-archbishop, in two forms. From 1772 he served as Konzertmeister, leader and supplier of the court orchestra, at a salary that began at 150 florins a year, composing the masses, serenades, concertos and divertimenti the court and cathedral calendar required. After the failed job-hunting journey of 1777 to 1779 he returned in a second capacity, as court organist from January 1779 at 450 florins a year, the post he held until the break of 1781. The duties were those of a liveried household servant as much as a musician’s: attendance at chapel and court, music on command for named occasions, composition within limits the reforming Archbishop Colloredo set on length and display. The violin concertos of 1775 and the great church works of these years were written inside that service, as its products and increasingly as its reproach.

Q: Why did Mozart quarrel with Archbishop Colloredo?

The quarrel had structural and personal layers, and the biography needs both. Structurally, Colloredo was a reforming employer who treated musicians as household servants, paid them accordingly, ranked them with the valets, restricted their leave and directed their output, while Mozart had been trained and fêted across Europe and no longer fitted the category. Personally, the Vienna spring of 1781 brought the friction to a head: Mozart was lodged and fed as a servant during the imperial celebrations, was refused permission to perform at a benefit concert where the Emperor would hear him, and was earning in weeks from teaching and private performance what Salzburg paid in months. His letters home document the confrontation of May 1781, the attempted resignation, and the final interview with the steward Count Arco, after which Mozart reported to his father that the dismissal had been delivered with a kick. The archbishop was within his rights. That was rather the point.

Q: How did a freelance composer earn a living in Vienna?

A freelance composer in the Vienna of the 1780s assembled an income from half a dozen separate streams, none of them guaranteed. He gave subscription concerts, academies, during the Lenten season, canvassing aristocratic subscribers in advance and performing his own new concertos. He taught the piano to the daughters of officials and financiers at high hourly fees. He accepted opera commissions for single payments, with no royalties afterwards. He sold works to publishers such as Artaria for one outright sum, copyright being too weak to promise more. He received dedications, presents and occasional pensions from patrons, and he took commissions for particular occasions, from coronation operas to dances for the imperial ballrooms. The portfolio could produce several thousand florins in a good year. It could also fail in several places at once, in a war year, in a sick year, in a year when fashion moved, and it carried no pension, no insurance and no employer of last resort.

Q: Did Mozart earn a lot of money?

Yes, by the standards of his profession and his city, and the documents are specific enough to end the argument. In his peak Viennese years, 1784 to 1786, the combined yield of subscription academies, teaching, publishing and commissions ran to several thousand florins a year, a level comparable with the salaries of senior imperial officials and far above the 450 florins of his Salzburg organist post. The imperial chamber composer’s appointment of December 1787 added a guaranteed 800 florins a year, diminished from the 2,000 florins Gluck had drawn for the same duties but still a salary most musicians never saw. The complication is that the income was irregular, seasonal and dependent on his health and presence, while his household costs were continuous and set at the level of the good years. Earnings are the wrong measure of his difficulty. Timing was the difficulty: plenty of money, arriving in the wrong months.

Q: Why did Mozart borrow money?

Mozart borrowed because his income arrived in lumps and his expenses did not, and because the last years of the decade turned the mismatch into a squeeze. From 1788 Austria’s war with the Ottoman Empire shrank the aristocratic economy that paid for subscriptions, lessons and commissions, while his household costs, a fashionable address, servants, copyists, his wife’s repeated cures at Baden after successive childbirths, continued at the level of the prosperous years. His borrowing was concentrated and businesslike: a series of loans from Michael Puchberg, a merchant and fellow Freemason, totalling roughly 1,400 florins across 1788 to 1791, each request tied to a named expected receipt and a proposed repayment, with partial repayments recorded between them. There are no such letters from the fat years of the middle decade, because there was no gap to bridge. He borrowed the way freelancers borrow when the alternative is to stop working: against income that existed but had not yet arrived.

Q: Who was Constanze Mozart?

Constanze Mozart, born Constanze Weber in January 1762, was the third daughter of the Mannheim music copyist Fridolin Weber and the wife Mozart married, against his father’s judgement, at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on 4 August 1782. She bore six children in eight years, of whom two sons survived, endured repeated illness and the Baden cures the letters chronicle, and was widowed at twenty-nine with debts of some two thousand florins and a roomful of manuscripts. Her subsequent record is the strongest evidence against the legend of her incapacity: she secured an imperial pension, organised benefit concerts, had the unfinished Requiem completed and delivered, sold the autographs to the publisher André on terms no living composer of the family had achieved, and supervised the materials of the Nissen biography of 1828 before dying at Salzburg in 1842. The biography’s fairest verdict is the contractual one: she ran the estate as a business because it was one.

Q: How many children did Mozart have?

Mozart and Constanze had six children, born between 1783 and 1791, and two of the six survived infancy. The first, Raimund Leopold, born in June 1783, died that August while his father was visiting Salzburg. Karl Thomas, born in September 1784, lived until 1858, becoming an official in Milan and, in old age, the guarded custodian of the family name. Johann Thomas Leopold, born in October 1786, died within the month; Theresia, born in December 1787, died in June 1788; Anna Maria, born in November 1789, died within hours of her birth. The youngest, Franz Xaver Wolfgang, born in July 1791, five months before his father’s death, became a professional pianist and composer, the only child to follow the trade. Four infant deaths in eight years was an unexceptional toll by eighteenth-century demography, and the household accounts register what the statistics conceal: confinements, doctors and nurses recurring as charges against the least predictable income in Vienna.

Q: Who commissioned the Requiem?

The Requiem was commissioned anonymously in the summer of 1791 by Franz, Count von Walsegg-Stuppach, a Lower Austrian landowner and fervent amateur musician whose established habit was to commission works from professionals and perform them at his estate as his own compositions. His wife Anna had died that February, aged twenty, and the requiem was intended for her memorial; the anonymity, the unnamed messenger and the instruction to ask no questions were conditions of the count’s deception, since the score had to arrive without an author if it was to be performed under his name. Mozart received fifty ducats for the commission, half in advance, and worked on the score through his final autumn. At his death it stood unfinished, and Constanze arranged its completion, first attempted by Joseph Eybler and then carried through by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, so that the balance of the fee could be claimed. Walsegg performed the completed work at Wiener Neustadt in December 1793, as his own.

Q: Is it true Mozart had a pauper’s funeral?

No. Mozart received a third-class funeral, with a blessing at St Stephen’s Cathedral, and was buried at the cemetery of St Marx in a common grave shared with other coffins, which was the standard provision for Vienna’s middling citizens under the burial reforms enacted by Joseph II in 1784. Those reforms directed burial to suburban cemeteries, prescribed common graves without individual monuments, and expected graves to be reused after a term of years; wealthier Viennese than Mozart were buried under the same rules. A pauper’s burial, at parish expense and without service, was a different and lower thing, and nothing in the funeral record resembles it. The famous embellishments collapse on inspection as well: the Viennese weather records for the day of the burial, 6 December 1791, describe mild and calm conditions rather than the legendary storm, and the grave’s later loss followed mechanically from the reuse the regulations prescribed.

Q: Should I read Mozart’s letters or a biography first?

Read a biography first, and then the letters, because the letters are performances that need a framework before they can be weighed. A documentary biography gives you the fixed points, the posts, the dates, the money, the named people, against which a letter’s version of events can be checked; without them, the loudest voice in the correspondence, which is by turns Leopold the manager, Wolfgang the petitioner and Wolfgang the clown, simply becomes the story. Armed with the framework, the letters then do what no biography can: they let you watch the people managing one another in something close to real time, pricing a tour, fighting over a marriage, talking a lender round. Take the letters in a scholarly edition with dates and circumstances attached rather than in a selection arranged for charm. The charm is real, and it is also the most misleading thing in the file, which is precisely why it should be read second and not first.

Q: Which Mozart biography is most reliable?

The biography that best survives checking against the documents is Maynard Solomon’s, whose reconstruction of the adult life from the financial and archival record, the subscription lists, the contracts, the borrowing letters and the estate papers, replaced the inherited legend with an auditable account and set the questions every later treatment has to answer. For the letters themselves, Cliff Eisen’s edition of the correspondence in English is the standard instrument, valuable as much for its apparatus of dates and circumstances as for the texts. Ruth Halliwell’s study of the family as a household is the necessary corrective on the early years and on Leopold, whose case she states from inside the family’s own paper. H. C. Robbins Landon remains the guide to the Viennese setting, the economy and institutions within which the freelance decade was attempted. Read together, these four correct one another’s emphases. Read singly, each will give you a Mozart shaped like its author’s evidence, which is why the documents themselves are the final court.

Q: How do I read the letters critically?

Treat every letter as an act with an audience, and ask four questions before believing any of it. Who is being written to, and what does the writer want from that person on that day: money, permission, forgiveness, employment, amusement? What is being priced, promised or excused, since these letters conduct business even when they appear to chat? What do the independent records say: the contracts, lists, registers and inventories that were not written to persuade anybody? And what is missing, because survival is biased: the tours are documented because a landlord kept a father’s reports, and the final decade is thinnest exactly where the story most wants a voice. Two habits protect against most errors. Never quote a borrowing letter without its date and its lender, since the file reads differently entire than in extracts. And never treat a joke as a confession or a formula as a feeling; the correspondence of a professional entertainer is itself a performance, which is what makes it evidence of a high order about everything except sincerity.

Q: How do I follow Mozart’s career in chronological order?

Follow it by the phases his own paperwork defines, and resist the greatest-hits order in which the works are usually met. Begin with the touring childhood of 1762 to 1769 and the family letters that report it, then the Italian journeys of 1769 to 1773 that made him an opera composer. Take the Salzburg service of 1773 to 1781 next, court organist’s salary, church music and all, since the Vienna decade is unintelligible except as its refusal. Then divide Vienna in two, as the career itself divides: the building years of 1781 to 1786, subscriptions, the Entführung, Figaro and the concerto seasons, and the strained years of 1787 to 1791, the small court salary, Don Giovanni and Così, the borrowing letters, Prague and the final autumn of the Flute, Tito and the Requiem. A useful discipline is to keep his own thematic catalogue beside you as you go: from 1784 he entered every finished work himself, with its date, and the catalogue is the career’s own table of contents.

Q: Which recordings suit a listener new to Mozart?

Choose recordings that let the structures be heard plainly, since the life makes most sense when the work that paid for it is audible as work. For the operas, begin with Le nozze di Figaro in a performance that keeps the ensembles crisp and the recitative moving, then Don Giovanni, then Die Zauberflöte, following the three theatres of his career, imperial, Prague and suburban, in the order he conquered them. For the instrumental music, take a set of the late piano concertos played on a fortepiano of the period type if you want to hear the balance his subscription audiences heard, since the lighter instrument clarifies the dialogue between soloist and orchestra that the modern piano can blur. The six quartets dedicated to Haydn repay early attention as documents of the friendship at the decade’s centre. Historical recordings by the generation of conductors who rebuilt his reputation after the war are worth hearing beside modern ones, because the contrast teaches how much of a classic is the performance tradition and how much is the score.

Q: How did Mozart’s reputation change after his death?

His reputation rose, changed character and acquired a mythology, in that order. In the first decade the works spread: Constanze’s concerts and the sale of the autographs to André put the music into professional circulation, the Requiem became a memorial fixture, and publishers competed for music the living composer had struggled to sell. The first biographies, Schlichtegroll’s necrology of 1793 and Niemetschek’s Prague life of 1798, fixed the double image of the miraculous child and the neglected master, and the nineteenth century, building its concert halls and canon, promoted the second image into a founding parable of genius unrecognised, adding the poisoning allegation, the storm at the burial and the pauper’s grave as the parable required them. The documentary scholarship of the twentieth century then dismantled the additions one by one, on evidence surviving all along in lists, registers and letters. What emerged is a reputation less Gothic and more durable: not a martyr to neglect, but the first composer of the modern market, whose music outlasted the market’s failure to sustain him.