Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Residence 1

📍Getreidegasse 9, Salzburg, Austria

“I was born on the third floor of 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg on the 27th of January 1756, in a yellow building on one of the old city's most crowded streets, where the merchants' signs hang overhead and the narrow lane echoes with footsteps and voices at all hours. The apartment was small for a family — my father Leopold, my mother, my sister Nannerl and I — but it was filled with music from my earliest memory. My father was a court musician and a formidable teacher, and by the age of three I was picking out thirds on the keyboard. By five I was composing. Salzburg formed me and constrained me in equal measure — its beauty was real, its Archbishop's court was stifling, and I spent much of my adult life trying to escape the place that had made me everything I was.”

Sources: Solomon, M. Mozart: A Life (1995), HarperCollins; Gutman, R. Mozart: A Cultural Biography (1999), Harcourt; Anderson, E. (ed.) The Letters of Mozart and His Family (1938), Macmillan

Residence 2

📍Domgasse 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria (Figarohaus)

“I arrived in Vienna at the age of sixteen after years of touring Europe as a child prodigy, and the city became my home and the centre of my creative life. I lived in a series of apartments — on the Schulerstrasse, the Rauhensteingasse where I died, and others — moving often, partly because of financial pressure and partly because of the Vienna of the 1780s's extraordinary musical culture. Vienna had opera, chamber music, concerts, a public that took music seriously and attended everything. I wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute here, and the last Jupiter Symphony. I died in Vienna at thirty-five, in poverty, and was buried in a common grave. The city that had given me everything gave me, in the end, a pauper's funeral.”

Sources: Solomon, M. Mozart: A Life (1995), HarperCollins; Gutman, R. Mozart: A Cultural Biography (1999), Harcourt

Residence 3

📍Domgasse 5, 1010 Wien, Austria

“Of my many addresses in Vienna — and there were many, since I moved constantly and owed money at most of them — the apartment on the Domgasse near the Stephansdom was where I was happiest and most productive. Between 1784 and 1787 I earned more money than I would ever earn again. The Marriage of Figaro was composed here, its libretto refined in these rooms through argument and laughter with Lorenzo da Ponte until midnight. Don Giovanni came after. I gave lessons in the front room, composed in the back, held string quartet evenings on Wednesdays to which Haydn came and said the kindest thing anyone has ever said to my father about me. My father visited once and noted approvingly that I appeared to have arrived. He was not wrong. I should note that by the time he visited, I had already begun borrowing money from Michael Puchberg that I would never repay. Happiness and debt were always simultaneous for me. These were my best years and they were already ending when I moved out.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Mozarthaus Vienna