Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo

Snapshot

Born 1732 in Vienna. Elected Archbishop of Salzburg 1772 after a 13-ballot contest. Enlightenment reformer: shortened Mass, reduced ceremony, banned pilgrimages, expanded schools. Mozart’s employer and antagonist; their relationship ended in 1781. Left Salzburg in 1800 ahead of French troops. The prince-archbishopric was secularised in 1803. Died 1812 in Vienna. The last Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.

The Story

Hieronymus von Colloredo ran Salzburg for thirty years and spent most of that time being resented for it. Born in 1732 into a prominent Viennese noble family, he was educated at the Theresianum, studied theology in Rome, and came to Salzburg’s archiepiscopal throne in 1772 after a contested election that took thirteen ballots to resolve. The Habsburg court wanted him. The local cathedral chapter and the citizens were considerably less enthusiastic.

He was an Enlightenment reformer, and he meant it. He shortened the Mass. He reduced ornate Baroque ceremony. He banned pilgrimages and Christmas cribs and large public processions. He introduced German hymns where Latin chant had always been. He expanded schools, built a press, promoted science over superstition. By the standards of Joseph II’s Vienna, he was a moderate. By the standards of Salzburg, he was stripping the city of its identity.

Mozart entered his employ in 1772 as concertmaster, earning a salary that was reasonable by Salzburg standards and insufficient for Mozart’s ambitions. The relationship held for nearly a decade. Colloredo commissioned works, allowed travel, and expected results. Mozart composed prodigiously and chafed at the restrictions: prescribed Mass lengths, limited instrumentation, the expectation that a court musician ate with the servants. By 1781 the tension broke. The final rupture happened in Vienna during a visit for the imperial coronation, ending with Mozart being dismissed in terms that included a literal kick from the archbishop’s chamberlain, Count Arco.

The story has been retold so often, and so sympathetically toward Mozart, that Colloredo has become the stock villain of classical music biography. The fuller picture is more ambiguous. He was an effective ruler who modernised a medieval theocracy and kept it financially solvent until an army arrived that he could not administer away. Napoleon’s forces reached Salzburg in 1800. Colloredo left for Vienna and did not come back.

The prince-archbishopric was secularised in 1803, ending an ecclesiastical state that had governed Salzburg since the days of Saint Rupert, over eleven hundred years earlier. Colloredo kept the title archbishop. He died in Vienna in 1812, the last person to hold secular power over the city in the name of the Church.