Mozart's birthplace

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's birthplace stands at No. 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg, Austria, and it holds a secret that most visitors do not expect. On the 27th of January 1756, in a third-floor apartment rented by a court musician named Leopold Mozart, a boy was born who would become one of the most performed composers in history. That apartment was modest: a kitchen, a small cabinet, a living room, a bedroom, and an office. Nothing about it suggested that the child born there would one day compose The Magic Flute on a clavichord that still survives today.

  What does it mean to grow up in a place like this? What did Leopold Mozart's household look like from the inside? And how does a building from the 12th century, owned at various times by Benedictine monks, a merchant, a court apothecary, and a family of landlords, come to house the most visited composer museum in the world? The answers are written into the walls of a place the Germans call Mozarts Geburtshaus, or sometimes simply the Hagenauerhaus.

• 2. Twelve Centuries of Ownership

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  Long before any Mozart set foot inside, the building at Getreidegasse had already accumulated centuries of history. It was constructed in the 12th century on land that had once belonged to the Benedictine monks of St Peter's, Salzburg. By 1408, a merchant named Otto Keutzel appears in records as the owner.

  Chunrad Fröschmoser, the court apothecary, purchased the property in 1585. His professional identity left a permanent mark on the building. On the doorway, a coiled serpent in a lion's mouth still testifies to his ownership; the image is the symbol of Asclepius, the ancient figure associated with medicine and healing.

  In 1703, the Hagenauer family took ownership. They had arrived in Salzburg around 1670, and within that family, Johann Laurenz Hagenauer would eventually become Mozart's landlord. The relationship between the Hagenauers and the Mozarts was not merely commercial. During the Mozart family's grand tour between 1763 and 1766, Leopold Mozart stayed in constant contact with his landlord through a sustained exchange of letters.

• 3. Leopold's Family on the Third Floor

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  Leopold Mozart married Anna Maria Pertl on the 21st of November 1747, and shortly after, he rented the third-floor apartment from the Hagenauers. Leopold held a position as a musician with the Salzburg Royal Chamber, which placed the family within the working world of court music.

  Seven children were born in that apartment. Only two survived: Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus. The weight of that statistic sits quietly behind every exhibit in the building today.

  The family remained at No. 9 Getreidegasse until 1773, when greater prosperity and the need for more space prompted them to move. Their next residence was the Tanzmeisterhaus, a building that itself became a Mozart museum in later years.

• 4. What the Museum Holds

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  The building became a museum in 1880, more than a century after Leopold Mozart first rented the apartment. The third floor, where the family actually lived, now exhibits Mozart's childhood violin, a harpsichord, portraits, documents, family letters, and early editions of his music. Records of his later life in Vienna are also preserved there, alongside materials about his wife and family.

  The second floor takes a different focus. It is devoted to Mozart's passionate interest in opera and contains the clavichord on which he composed The Magic Flute. The presence of that instrument anchors one of the most celebrated works in the operatic repertoire to a specific object a visitor can stand before.

  The first floor reconstructs the domestic conditions of Mozart's era through period furniture. One of the most striking individual objects in the entire collection is an incomplete portrait of Mozart painted by Joseph Lange in 1789. Lange was Mozart's brother-in-law, which makes the painting a family document as much as an artistic one. The Mozart Foundation owns the building.

• 5. A Composer's Early Instruments

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  Mozart's childhood violin appears in the collection twice in the source record, a sign of how central that object is to the museum's identity. The instrument represents the period before the public career, before the tours, before the operas. It belongs to a boy who grew up in five rooms on the third floor of a building the monks of St Peter's once used as garden land.

  The harpsichord on the third floor and the clavichord on the second floor together span different phases of Mozart's musical life. The clavichord carries a specific and remarkable provenance: it is the instrument on which The Magic Flute was composed. That opera premiered in 1791, the year Mozart died, and the keyboard that produced it can be traced back to the apartment building where he first drew breath. The incomplete Lange portrait of 1789 is another object that carries the weight of finality; it was painted just two years before Mozart's death, and it was never finished.