When Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781, Baron Gottfried van Swieten was one of the people who mattered most. In 1782 van Swieten introduced him to the music of Bach and Handel, an encounter that changed everything about how Mozart composed in the last decade of his life.
The Story
Gottfried van Swieten was born in Leiden to a Dutch physician father who became the personal doctor to Empress Maria Theresa, and grew up in the Habsburg court world. He became Director of the Vienna Court Library and used his position and his private wealth to pursue his passion for the music of an earlier generation. At a time when Bach and Handel were largely unknown in Viennese musical circles, van Swieten organised regular Sunday morning concerts at his home where he had their works performed and studied.
In 1782 he introduced Mozart to this repertoire. Mozart was overwhelmed. He began studying Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier intensively and absorbed the principles of counterpoint in a way that changed his compositional thinking permanently. The late works that followed, the Jupiter Symphony with its extraordinary fugal finale, the late string quintets, and the unfinished Requiem, all carry the marks of that encounter.
Van Swieten was also one of the primary patrons of Joseph Haydn in Haydn's final creative period, writing the libretti for both The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), two of the greatest works in the entire classical choral canon. He has no direct Salzburg connection, but for anyone following Mozart's artistic development, van Swieten belongs in the story.
