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

music in some form, and experienced first-hand the consequences of Joseph’s liturgical
reforms.
Despite their shared experiences, Mozart and Vienna’s church musicians found
themselves in substantially different work environments, even when one takes into account
the compositional ambitions of many regens chori. On the one hand was Mozart, the
freelance artist, active in public concerts and the distribution of primarily secular music; on
the other, a class of instrumentalists and singers indebted to a religious institution for
support, performing a highly specialised repertoire. For Mozart, newly freed from the
constraints of working under an uncongenial employer in a declining principality, church
music may have represented one of the less attractive possibilities for professional
advancement. Yet the very availability of a large body of instrumentalists and singers, many
of whom were active in secular music as well, made it advantageous to establish contacts
within this world, particularly for the possibility of recruitment into orchestral rosters. 82
What of Mozart’s religious activities more generally? As a resident of Vienna since
the inception of Joseph’s sole rule, the composer was ideally placed to observe the quickening
pace of reform, albeit from the perspective of a recently-arrived outsider. Yet the surviving
evidence in Mozart’s letters offers only a few hints as to the composer’s attitude towards
church matters and the place of religion in his life more generally during the early 1780s.
One reason for the paucity of evidence, particularly in regard to Mozart’s church attendance,
was the ubiquitous and theoretically obligatory nature of Confession and Communion,
services so common as to require no special mention. For the composer, however, there were
particular incentives in revealing his religious observance, and the occasional references to it
82 An ambitious series of subscription concerts such as those put on by Mozart in the 1780s must have required
a considerable number of instrumentalists. Little is known at this stage about how Mozart went about
recruiting these performers.
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