Mozart and his Death Mask; Bombing the Historic City of Salzburg

Salzburg’s favorite son changed the world of music forever. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756-1791, was born Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Gottlieb Mozart and baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He was the 7th child of Leopold Mozart, snd would produced over 600 compositions in a wide range of musical forms and some of the most beautiful music the world has ever heard. In 1782, he embarked on the composition of piano concertos, so that he could appear both as composer and soloist. He wrote fifteen before the end of 1786.

His father, musician Leopold Mozart, 1719-1787, served under five Archbishops in his 44 years in the Salzburg court orchestra. Leopold entered the service of Count Thurn-Valsassina und Taxis and remained in his service for three years until 1743 when he was appointed fourth violinist to the court orchestra under Archbishop Firmian. The two Archbishops most important to he and his son would be Count Sigismund Christoph Schrattenbach, a music lover who appointed Leopold vice Kapell meister in 1763, with the freedom to promote his son’s career, and domineering Count Hieronymus Colloredo, elected archbishop in 1772, who liked music but dictated where and how the music would be used and treated court musicians poorly.

In 1770, Mozart also received employment in the court of Salzburg and spent ten unhappy years in what must have seemed a janitorial position, forced to live by the strict rules of the royal household and required to dine with the servants and endure their indignities. Notoriously cheap, Colloredo ordered his court composers to never write a mass longer than twenty minutes, yet used public funds to build extravagant palaces and gardens to please a very close lady friend.

In a letter to his father in 1778, the twenty-two-year-old Wolfgang wrote, “the Archbishop can never pay me enough to compensate for the slavery of Salzburg.” A later letter charged that Colloredo “glorifies himself through his dependants, robs them of the service and pays them nothing for it!” Finally, after several trying events, young Mozart asked to be released from the position.

Mozart married his first love’s sister, Konstanze Weber. After a few travels, they made their home in Vienna for the remainder of his short life. Their rambunctious and apparently happy marriage produced six children, of whom only two survived. After Mozart’s death, Konstanze married Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen.

At the age of 34, a penniless Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart expired and was laid to rest in a nameless pauper’s grave.

Then there is the controversy over Mozart’s death mask. According to legend, Count Joseph Deym von Stritetz made a plaster cast of Mozart’s face upon his death and subsequently exhibited the death mask in his gallery/museum, placed on a wax figure dressed in fancy clothing. When the Count died in 1804, the mask went to his widow and upon her death in 1821 it vanished. Then, in 1947, a death mask turned up in an antique shop in Austria and ended up in the ownership of a sculptor named Willy Kauer who, thinking it looked like Mozart, tried to get the Austrian Ministry of Education to commission an inquiry in 1948 as to its authenticity. Although the mask had several features in common with Mozart, including pox marks, they released their findings as inconclusive in 1949. There was another investigation in 1950 and this time they decided that the mask was unlikely to be Mozart’s and it was returned to Kauer.

By 1956, the Mozarteum sponsored yet another examination of it and studied two initials inside it, seemingly from a bronze caster in Vienna who worked during Mozart’s life named Thaddaus Ribola. He had a studio next to Count Deym’s gallery during the 1790’s. Still, not enough evidence to be sure. You decide from the pictures below (above). At the left is a recently discovered portrait.

In the needless, last minute Allied bombing of the historic gem of Salzburg, virtually all of the old churches in the vicinity of the blasts lost their magnificent stained glass windows to the explosions.

On the morning of May 4, 1945, tanks of the XV Corps 106th Cavalry Division rolled through Salzburg, a mere three days after it had again been hit hard by American bombers. 40 percent of Salzburg’s buildings had been destroyed or damaged by Allied bombing. The dome was blown off of the famous, old Salzburg Cathedral which had witnessed so much history, above right.

The terror-bombing raid also hit the house Mozart lived in for many years on Hannibalplatz, above, bottom right, and almost totally destroyed it on October 16, 1944. It was long ago called the Dancing Master’s House “Tanzmeistersaal.” Mozart lived there until his departure for Vienna in 1780. Nannerl lived there until her marriage in 1785, and Leopold remained in this house until his death in 1787. The Mozarts gave many private concerts here; The International Mozarteum Foundation purchased the surviving section of the ruins in 1955, left, and turned it into a museum and, with great effort, reproduced it close to the original.