Letters and Documents of W. A. Mozart and His Family
From the Holdings of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg

Project Status

Letters and Documents of the Mozart Family

The correspondence of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and his family, which was published in print in the complete edition by Wilhelm A. Bauer and Otto Erich Deutsch in 1962, was progressively revised according to the sources. Gaps have been filled and the correspondence up to 1858 which had been only partially published in excerpts by Bauer/Deutsch has been systematically expanded.

The texts will be rendered in a diplomatic transcription (html format). The Editorial Guidelines contain information regarding editorial decisions and reproduction format. Reproduction in html format differentiates between the original text document (letters written by hand, meant for mailing) and later annotations in the manuscript by a foreign hand (numbering, signatures, stamps/ seals, information added to the original by a foreign hand with commentary about the provenance, writer, etc.).

A printable version of the main text (in letters with addresses) without the annotations in a foreign hand is available to users as a PDF document. 

Within the context of the systematic revision and edition of documents, the following groups of texts have been completed:

1. Travel Letters

The new edition of letters begins with correspondence stemming from the time of the three Italian journeys of Leopold and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (December 1769 to February 1773). More than three-quarters of the original source material is found in the collection of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg and can therefore be rendered as texts and images.  Although some of autographs for a small number of letters are missing, their texts, however, could often be reconstructed using the transcriptions made by Georg Nikolaus Nissen who had access to the originals when preparing the text for his Mozart biography in 1825 (the biography was published posthumously in 1828/ 1829). In addition, transcriptions have been provided for original letters not in possession of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg.

2. Letters and Documents to 1858

Letters and documents from the Mozart family found in the collection of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg (ISM) will be published in this phase of the project.  Some 250 documents are currently available. These stem primarily from the period after 1800 and most have  been only published separately or in excerpt form.

The main body of works consists of the letters of the Mozart family (Constanze Mozart, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Carl Thomas Mozart, Franz Xavier Wolfgang Mozart, Sophie Haibel) stemming from 1791, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart's death year, and 1858, the death year of his son, Carl Thomas Mozart.  Recipients of the letters were family members, publishers, musicians and friends. 

An additional collection of documents contains other third-party letters and documents relating to Mozart's legacy (including his works, the biography of Georg Nikolaus Nissen). A smaller part of the ISM collection encompasses official documents (including original documents from Wolfgang Amadé Mozart), as well as poems, etc.