Dominicus Hagenauer

The man Mozart wrote a mass for. Dominicus Hagenauer was the son of Lorenz Hagenauer, Mozart’s landlord and Leopold Mozart’s closest friend. The two families lived in the same building on the Getreidegasse for years. Born Cajetan Hagenauer, he became a Benedictine monk at Stift St. Peter and took the religious name Dominicus.

In 1769, when Dominicus celebrated his first solemn mass at St. Peter’s, the seventeen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the Missa solemnis in C major (K. 66) for the occasion. The work has been known ever since as the “Dominicus Mass,” a direct product of the deep friendship between the two families.

Dominicus later rose to become Abbot of Stift St. Peter from 1786 to 1811, presiding over the abbey through the Napoleonic era and the secularisation of the archbishopric. His connection to Mozart, through both family and the famous mass that bears his name, makes him one of the most personally entangled figures in the story of Mozart’s Salzburg.