MOZART AND THE PRACTICE OF SACRED MUSIC, 1781-91 a ...

letzter Lebenszeit, einer langwierigen Krankheit meiner Mutter wegen, ich die ganzen Tage in
seiner Studirstube zubrachte. 150
Constanze’s visits to Baden prompted an exchange of letters between the couple that is justly
celebrated for the information it provides on Mozart’s musical and social activities in his last
year. As usual, Constanze’s half of the conversation is lost, a particularly unfortunate state of
affairs given the mode of her husband’s surviving letters at this time. Unlike Mozart’s letters
from abroad, which required the composer to describe people and places that were unknown
to his recipient, the Baden letters were exchanged between a couple who knew their shared
environment intimately and who corresponded on a very frequent, sometimes daily, basis. As
a result, Mozart’s late letters assume a close contextual knowledge of the people and events
they document, a knowledge that is difficult or impossible to reconstruct today. Numerous
attempts by amateur enthusiasts to derive information about the personal lives of Mozart,
Constanze and Franz Xaver Süssmayr from these letters have consistently foundered on the
authors’ lack of expertise in interpreting this difficult material and a failure to consider the
nature and function of the Mozarts’ correspondence. 151
For our purposes, the most important aspect of the Baden letters is the
unprecedented information they provide about Mozart’s church attendance and activities in
sacred music during the last two years of his life. From these letters, we know that at least
two Mozart masses were performed in Baden, both under the direction of the composer, and
further that Mozart took part in the performance of a gradual by Michael Haydn. Of course,
a strong but circumstantial tradition connects Baden with the composition of Mozart’s
motet Ave, verum corpus K. 618, although I shall suggest further possible contexts for this
150 MBA, vi.666. In 1856, the Blättern für Musik, Theater und Kunst reported Carl as recalling that “Vater
Mozart ihn [Carl] viel spazieren führen müssen, da Mutter Constanze damals lange kränkelte und das Haus
hütete.” Deutsch, Dokumente, 533.
151 The supposed evidence for many of these theories is effectively dismissed in Michael Lorenz, “Süssmayr und
die Lichterputzer: Von Gefundenen und Erfundenen Quellen,” in Mozart-Jahrbuch 2006 (Kassel: Bärenreiter,
forthcoming). I am grateful to Lorenz for providing me with a copy of this article prior to publication.
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