Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg

In an unprecedented collaboration, the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg and the Morgan Library & Museum have partnered to tell the story of the life and career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Objects from the Salzburg collections will cross the Atlantic for the first time, including Mozart’s own clavichord and violin, as well as famous portraits, letters, and personal objects of Mozart and his family. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg also draws from the Morgan’s extensive collections of music manuscripts, letters, and first editions that feature the forms in which Mozart was preeminent: symphony, piano concerto, and opera. Evoking the cities, homes, and people that shaped the composer, the exhibition highlights Mozart’s many travels, continual quest for employment and renown, family tensions, and constant creative output amid frequent illness and other challenges. It also illustrates Mozart’s existence under aristocratic patronage, a context both foreign and familiar to modern viewers.

The exhibition focuses on the two family chapters of Mozart’s life: his youth with his father, Leopold, and sister Nannerl in Salzburg, and his adult life with his wife, Constanze, in Vienna. After Mozart’s death in 1791, Nannerl and Constanze returned to Salzburg, where they, with the composer’s two sons, preserved and built his legacy. Their collection became the foundation of the modern-day Mozarteum.

In the nineteenth century, partly through Beethoven’s influence, Mozart was reinvented as a foundation of the emerging idea of “classical music.” This exhibition explores how Mozart forged deep connections with listeners during his life and examines his enduring influence after his death, stemming from his posthumous reinvention.