Maria Anna Thekla Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Maria Anna Thekla Mozart was born in Augsburg on the 25th of September 1758, and she lived long enough to outlast her famous cousin by fifty years. She was the third child of Franz Alois Mozart, a younger brother of Leopold Mozart, and his wife Maria Victoria Eschenbach. Of five daughters, she was the only one to survive. History remembers her mainly as a footnote to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's story. But ten surviving letters tell a different and more intimate tale. Those letters, all written from Wolfgang to his cousin, have become known as the Bäsle letters. They reveal a relationship that was warm, irreverent, and by most readings, deeply affectionate. Who was the woman on the other end of that correspondence? And what happened to her after the warmth cooled?

• 2. The Bäsle Letters

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  Between the 11th and the 26th of October 1777, nineteen-year-old Marianne met her twenty-one-year-old cousin Wolfgang in Augsburg. The young people developed a close, probably intimate relationship. Ten letters from that correspondence have survived, and every one of them was written by Wolfgang. The letters are remarkable for their abundance of scatological and sexual humor. Scholar Maynard Solomon translated one passage from a letter dated the 23rd of December 1778 into rhymed English, rendering lines that speak of smacks, embraces, guns firing in the rear, and debts paid to the uttermost groat. The tone is playful and unguarded in a way Mozart rarely displayed in his better-known correspondence. In the original German, the nickname Bäsle is a diminutive, meaning "little cousin," and it carries an undeniable tenderness. These ten letters are the primary window into a relationship the rest of the historical record largely ignores.

• 3. Salzburg and Separation

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  That same letter of December 1778 contained an invitation for Marianne to visit Mozart and his family in Salzburg, and she accepted. After Mozart returned from Paris, she accompanied him in January 1779 from Munich to Salzburg, staying there for several months. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father, disapproved of the visit. Marianne may have hoped the relationship would lead to marriage. If so, the hope was not realized. The former warmth between the two cousins cooled during her time in Salzburg, and their last reunion took place in Augsburg in March 1781. After that meeting, the record between them goes silent.

• 4. Life Beyond Wolfgang

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  Marianne is described as having been beautiful, endearing, bright, humorous, and in love with life. She had been educated in keeping with her rank as a citizen of the Free City of the Holy Roman Empire, and as a teenager received further social education in Munich. In 1784, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter named Maria Josepha. The child's father, canon Dr. Theodor Franz de Paula Maria Baron von Reibeld, who lived from 1752 to 1807, provided generously for both mother and child. Marianne never married. After her mother was widowed in 1791 and later died, Marianne moved in 1808 to live with her daughter and son-in-law, a postmaster named Franz-Joseph Streitel. The family moved to Kaufbeuren in 1812 and settled in Bayreuth in 1814.

• 5. Final Years in Bayreuth

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  Already in 1803, the family's only grandchild, Carl Joseph, had died in infancy. Marianne lived in Bayreuth for twenty-seven years, until her death on the 25th of January 1841 at the age of eighty-two. Among her possessions was a portrait of Wolfgang, which he had sent her from Mannheim in 1778. Only fifteen months after Marianne died, her fifty-eight-year-old daughter Maria Josepha died as well. Both were buried in the municipal cemetery in Bayreuth. Their graves can no longer be found. In the years that followed, two memorial plates were placed in their honor: one at the Old Coaching House, and one at the entrance of the municipal cemetery.