Abbe Joseph Bullinger was a Jesuit priest in Salzburg and Leopold Mozart's most trusted confidant. Leopold wrote to him in tones he used with almost no one else. Their correspondence is one of the most candid documents in the Mozart record.
The Story
Joseph Bullinger came from Bavaria and settled in Salzburg as a Jesuit priest and tutor, eventually serving as chaplain to the Lodron family, one of the city's most prominent aristocratic houses. That position placed him at the intersection of Salzburg's religious and social elite, and in the world where Leopold Mozart moved as a court musician and teacher.
The friendship that developed between Bullinger and Leopold was unusually close. Leopold's letters to Bullinger, preserved and widely studied by Mozart scholars, contain admissions of financial worry, exasperation at Wolfgang's stubbornness, and reflections on the family's uncertain future that Leopold kept almost entirely out of his other correspondence. Bullinger appears to have been the person Leopold trusted to hear things he could not say elsewhere.
In historical terms Bullinger is a small figure. But for anyone reading through the Mozart letters and trying to understand what Leopold actually felt about the world his son was making and breaking around him, Bullinger is one of the essential addresses.
