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

visit, and Stoll duly found her rooms in the house “Zum Blumenstock,” today Renngasse
4. 238 Mozart himself was in Baden from 13 to 18 June, and tradition has it that he lived in a
hut within the grounds of the house where Constanze was staying. 239 According to a
complimentary legend, Ave, verum corpus was written there as a gesture of thanks to Stoll for
arranging Constanze’s accommodation. There is however no documentary evidence that
Stoll had the autograph or a copy of the work before Mozart’s departure on the 18 th , or
indeed that the work was performed in Baden at all during 1791. 240 In the absence of such
evidence for Ave, verum corpus, commentators have relied on a principle frequently
encountered in Mozart scholarship, especially in relation to the piano concertos, in which a
recently completed score is linked to a performance of unknown content on the basis of
chronological proximity. Given the performance history of K. 275, K. 317 and perhaps other
Mozart masses in Baden, it is a reasonable suggestion that Ave, verum corpus was indeed
performed in Baden on Corpus Christi, the following Sunday or the octave. We should
however be wary of plausible yet unproven suggestions coalescing into solid fact, as we have
seen with the Krönungsmesse and throughout Mozart research more generally, and the
potential for such assumptions to mask other possible contexts for the composer’s music.
On Corpus Christi and the following Sunday, Mozart was not in Baden, but in
Vienna. Constanze was still in Baden at this time, but the loss of her letters has removed any
possibility of confirming a performance of Ave, verum corpus under Stoll. She does seem to
have written to her husband on both Corpus Christi and the following day: Mozart’s letter
of 25 June, written two days after the feast, opens with the announcement that he has just
238 Surviving envelopes from Mozart’s subsequent letters to Constanze in Baden bear the instruction “bey Hr:
Sündikus abzugeben.” The Stadtsyndikus Johann Georg Grundgeyer owned the house “Zum Blumenstock”;
MBA, vi.410.
239 See Hermann Rollett, “Mozart in Baden,” Mozarteums Mitteilungen 2 (1920): 110.
240 Stoll of course later possessed the autograph of K. 618, but, as I have noted, we do not know when he
obtained this manuscript or the remaining Mozart autographs he possessed.
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