The Stiftung Mozarteum is the world's pre-eminent institution for the preservation and study of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's legacy, founded in Salzburg in 1841. It manages the two Mozart house museums, holds the most significant Mozart archive anywhere, and organises the annual Mozartwoche, the densest concentration of serious Mozart performance anywhere in the world.
The Story
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756, Salzburg was the city of the archbishop-princes, not yet the city of Mozart. It took several decades after his death in 1791 for his Salzburg connection to become a central part of the city's identity. The Stiftung Mozarteum, founded in 1841, was one of the institutions that built and institutionalised that identity.
The foundation manages the two most important Mozart addresses in the city. Mozarts Birthplace on Getreidegasse, where he was born on 27 January 1756, has been a museum since the nineteenth century; the Getreidegasse location in the heart of the Altstadt makes it one of the most-visited sites in Austria. Mozarts Residence on Makartplatz, where the Mozart family moved in 1773, is larger and less crowded, and its exhibits cover the later Salzburg years and the European tours.
The archive held by the Stiftung is the primary scholarly resource for Mozart research internationally: it includes autograph manuscripts, correspondence, and documents that are not available anywhere else. The research library draws musicologists from around the world.
The annual Mozartwoche (Mozart Week), held each January, is the Stiftung's most public event: a concentrated festival of historically informed performance at the Mozarteum concert halls, with the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg as house orchestra and international soloists and conductors drawn from the top of the early-music and classical worlds. Bernhard Paumgartner, who led the Stiftung for decades through the mid-twentieth century, shaped its approach to both scholarship and performance, and his influence is still felt in the Mozartwoche's character.