News, Reactions and Responses

Some of my blog posts have lead to responses and reactions that are too interesting not to be published. The many cases where my posts have already been referred to in print compensate the fact that some journalists (and musicologists) think that digital publications "do not really count" and can either be ignored or copied at will. Some comments added greatly to my amusement, because some readers seem to think that on this blog – like on countless others – material is being rehashed that can be found somewhere else on the internet. They soon realize that this is not a blog like any other and my research can rarely backed up by information that has already appeared elsewhere.

The Mysterious Grassi Document

Shortly after the opening of the exhibition Mozart-Bilder Bilder Mozarts in January 2013 the Mozarteum Foundation launched an article in The New York Times to drum up public interest in the exhibition and a "newly identified Mozart portrait". The article, titled "Wolfgang, Is That You?", presented a miniature on a snuffbox as the work of "Joseph Maria Grassi" that the Salzburg researchers had supposedly been able to identify as Mozart after the surprising discovery of a hitherto unknown document:

A rummage through the archives found a document showing the object's provenance. The document said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for 10 years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna. Letters from Mozart indicate that Grassi's brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart. Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother and attached the miniature.

That the important newly discovered document was not mentioned in the exhibition catalog came as a slight surprise. On 6 February 2013 in my blogpost "'The Newly Discovered Mozart Portrait': Back to Reality" I referred to this disappointing fact as follows:

What we read here, quickly takes us down from the spheres of "sensationally new discoveries" to the low grounds of only too well-known dull speculation. The "certainty" that the press release has been bragging about is gone and the shadow of "we don't really know anything for sure" is lying heavily on the the portrait's supposed authenticity. [...] This mysterious "document" (which could not be located by the Mozarteum experts in the course of the yearslong preparation of their current exhibition) is still unpublished. Since (as stated by Dr. Großpietsch) "Mozart owned several tobacco boxes", its provable[!] connection to the box in question remains doubtful. There is no proof at all that Anton Mathias Grassi (b. 26 June 1755 Vienna, d. 31 December 1807 Vienna) was a "sculptor friend" of Mozart's (as a matter of fact he was a model sculptor at the Imperial Vienna Porcelain Manufactory). To establish a close connection between Anton Grassi and Mozart is an even bigger stretch than the inflation of Joseph Grassi's dancing activities in 1783 into an intimate friendship with the composer.

It seemed that the new document that proved that Mozart had owned the snuffbox for ten years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi had simply been found too late to be included in the exhibition catalog. It was to be expected that the Mozarteum would publish this important source as soon as possible to make it available to scholars interested in Mozart portraiture. But nothing happened. The mysterious document remained secret. Thus in January 2014 I added the following postscript to my blogpost:

The document that according to the 2013 article in the New York Times, "said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for ten years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna" has still not been published by the Mozarteum.

One year later the situation remains unchanged. The document that according to the New York Times was found during "a rummage through the archives" has still not been published. It has by now acquired the taint of a canard.

The Reaction of the Haydn-Institut

On 26 September 2014 my articles "Three Unknown Godchildren of Joseph Haydn" and "Joseph Haydn's Real Wife" led to the following reaction from the Haydn-Institut in Cologne:

Congratulations, that's a minor sensation! On one hand we are thrilled by your new research results, on the other hand ashamed, because Haydn research for so many decades has simply copied what had been carelessly published. I think it would be wonderful - and an honor for us – if you would be willing to publish this research in our Haydn-Studien, in whatever form. Would it be possible to just do a German version of the blog? We would be delighted to hear from you in this regard!

On 22 November 2014 I asked the Haydn-Institut what fee they could imagine to pay for a German article covering my recent Haydn research. I have not heard back from them since and therefore I assume that the Haydn-Institut expects me to provide unpaid work. Given the financial resources of its sponsors, the Haydn-Institut can only be congratulated for being blessed with a staff that can afford to work for free. I am not in such a lucky position.

A Letter From Elbie Lebrecht

In my article on the notoriously misattributed portrait of the "young Schubert" I referred to the fact that the CD producer's decision to use this picture was based on a misattribution in the database of the Lebrecht Music & Arts picture library. My pointing out this mistake in the picture database lead to the following response from Elbie Lebrecht:

Dear Michael Lorenz,

My husband has forwarded your letter to me.  I am really grateful to you for pointing out the error about incorrectly identifying an image as being of Franz Schubert. I have amended our website accordingly. And you are absolutely correct about our source of information. It is very beneficial to have someone who is so knowledgeable pick up on these slips. We obviously do our best to try and have two sources confirming information but there will, inevitably, be errors.

I set up the photo library in 1992 with just a few images. We now have over 300,000 -  many of which are from other photo libraries. Obviously the higher the number the greater the chance of errors creeping in. Please do keep in contact with me as your input is very much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Elbie Lebrecht
Director Lebrecht Music & Arts

This response, which is a model of true professionalism, makes one wish that all institutions would react this way when made aware of an error. The falsely attributed portrait of "young Schubert" has been removed from the Lebrecht database.

Concerning "Beethoven's Elise"

Following my letter to the editor of The Musical Times, I was invited to explain my hypothesis concerning the identity of "Beethoven's Elise" in an article for the Winter 2014 issue of this journal which would be published together with letters to the editor from Barry Cooper and Rita Steblin. I decided not to make use of this invitation, because I think my hypothesis is of minor importance and, for the time being, the "Elise" issue has reached a dead end. As I have stated repeatedly, as long as the autograph of the Albumblatt WoO 59 remains lost, the dedicatee of the piece cannot be identified. My explicit criticism of Kopitz and Steblin was not primarily motivated by my rejection of their "Elise" theories. The identity of this lady is in my opinion far too unimportant. What prompted me to criticise Kopitz were his dubious methods, namely the publication of an untenable, not sufficiently researched theory in the press and the following shameless propaganda with sockpuppets on Wikipedia. In Steblin's case it was the irrepressible urge to get her name into the press, followed by a belated publication with a yawning gap in the chain of evidence. In his article "Eine Bagatelle und andere Kleinigkeiten", which in 2014 he published in volume 11 of the Bonner Beethoven Studien, Jürgen May, an employee of the Richard Strauss Institut in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, brought research on "Beethoven's Elise" to a temporary standstill. He showed that Elise Schachner, the daughter and heiress of the owner of the autograph of WoO 59 Rudolph Schachner, died childless in February 1951. He suggested that the autograph of the Albumblatt may have been put into Schachner's coffin in 1896, together with Therese von Droßdik's letters. Beethoven's manuscript obviously did not end up with Elise Schachner's friend, the painter and collector of Beethoveniana Gustav Lörincz de Baranyai who, for some time, was in possession of material from Therese von Droßdik's estate. In the conclusion of his article, May, in my opinion, makes an important point: the owner of the autograph Babette Bredl (Rudolph Schachner's mother) had every reason to keep her relation to Elise Schachner a secret. Therefore, in return for her permission to publish the Albumblatt, she may have requested unconditional discretion from Nohl who may have had no permission to publish completely correct information concerning the inscription on the autograph and the identity of the mysterious "Elise". More entertaining "new solutions" concerning the Elise mystery will surely be presented in the future. After all, each Elisabeth who ever knew Beethoven deserves to have her turn.

A page of Therese von Droßdik's will which I first published in 2001. The last sentence in the next to last paragraph reads: "[...] ferners mein Nußbaum Magohani Flügel nebst allen Musikalien vermache ich Freund Rudolph Schachner Tonkünstler, aus München". (A-Wsa, Landesgericht f. Zivilrechtssachen, 1121/1844)

Mozart According to Baur

Eva Gesine Baur, who after the publication of her Mozart biography in 2014, apparently craved a little more media attention, commissioned the German graphic designer Daniela Gattinger to draw a portrait of "Mozart as he really looked like" which was published by several newspapers.

This amusing portrait confronts the public with the sensationally new and shocking fact that Mozart was not handsome. Who would have thought that he did not look like the guy on the Mozart ball? Even the Swiss free daily Blick am Abend (which is really not known for its high standards) filed this portrait under "Neues aus Absurdistan":

One can only hope that in the future Baur will put her money into the production of other, equally priceless Mozart curiosities.

© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2015.

"The Newly Discovered Mozart Portrait": Back to Reality

On 11 January 2013 the Mozarteum in Salzburg published a press release that contained the following page:

The gist of this announcement is as follows:

The Mozart Discovery. Hitherto the small portrait on a tobacco box came with a huge question mark. Now it is certain: it shows a portrait if the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! In the course of a thorough study of all the documents and sources this portrait could definitely be identified as a Mozart portrait from 1783. The miniature shows a striking resemblance to the 1829 engraving by the Dresden engraver Gottschick, wh with this engraving refers to a miniature by Grassi. The portrait on the box could well be a work by Grassi, because Mozart and the painter met each other in Vienna.

Here is the page in the book about the exhibition that deals with the supposed Mozart miniature: 

What we read here, quickly takes us down from the spheres of "sensationally new discoveries" to the low grounds of only too well-known dull speculation. The "certainty" that the press release has been bragging about is gone and the shadow of "we don't really know anything for sure" is lying heavily on the the portrait's supposed authenticity:

Joseph Maria[sic!] Grassi (1757-1838)?[sic!] [...] The miniature shows a striking resemblance to the 1829 engraving by the Dresden engraver Gottschick who refers to a 1785 miniature by Grassi. The portrait on the box could[sic!] well be a 1783 work by Grassi or done from a 1783 model, when Mozart and the painter met each other in Vienna. Possibly[sic!] the object is identical with the "box lid that was done not long after his death, probably based on speculation" as the widow [Constanze Mozart] put it in 1800. It is conceivable[sic] that there were several Grassi miniatures of this portrait which looks unfamiliar to us today.

Thus, the whole "sensation" simply boils down to the following points:

• There is no proof that this miniature was intended to show Mozart.
• There is no proof that it was done from life.
• The miniature is being attributed to Joseph Grassi in the book based only on a handwritten[!] note on a copy of Gottschick's 1829 engraving. This note has no provable connection to Gottschick who (for reasons not difficult to imagine) did not put this attribution on his engraving, but only wrote "Nach einem Miniaturgemälde 1785, gestochen von Gottschick 1829".

• From a purely technical point of view this portrait is starkly at odds with Grassi's work and does not fit into the corpus of his oeuvre. Dr. Großpietsch seems to have delved very lightly into Grassi's life, since he does not even know the painter's correct forenames and erroneously calls him "Joseph Maria" (while his name was Joseph Mathias).
• The dating of the portrait with the appearance of Grassi's name in a Mozart letter is totally arbitrary. There is no provable connection between Mozart and Grassi, apart from the fact that at a ball in 1783 both of them took part in a pantomime.
• None of the information presented by the Mozarteum on p. 96 of the book about the exhibition is new. The information simply copies research that has already been published in 2008 by Dr. Richard Bauer in his book Das rekonstruierte Antlitz (Neustadt an der Aisch: 2008). Bauer is not being given credit by the Mozarteum in connection with the miniature portrait in question.

The articles in the book published by the Mozarteum are classic examples of the deep lack of logical thinking among scholars, who seem to be dazed by the "Salzburg Mozart Bubble" when it comes to logic and a clear methodology in defining *authenticity* in historical portraiture. I will deal with fundamental issues regarding the authenticity of Mozart portraits in an upcoming review of the exhibition book on this blog. 

In the course of a desperate publicity campaign, the Mozarteum took advantage of a journalist's naivete and launched an article in today's New York Times, titled "Wolfgang, Is That You?". In this strangely superficial piece of "popular science" we are being confronted again with the usual mixture of factoids and unsubstantiated conclusions. According to the article in the NYT, "a rummage through the archives found a document showing the object’s provenance". Quote:

The document said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for 10 years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna. Letters from Mozart indicate that Grassi’s brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart. Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother and attached the miniature, Ms. Ramsauer said.

This mysterious "document" (which could not be located by the Mozarteum experts in the course of the yearslong preparation of their current exhibition) is still unpublished. Since (as stated by Dr. Großpietsch) "Mozart owned several tobacco boxes", its provable[!] connection to the box in question remains doubtful. There is no proof at all that Anton Mathias Grassi (b. 26 June 1755, Vienna, d. 31 December 1807, Vienna) was a "sculptor friend" of Mozart's (as a matter of fact he was a model sculptor at the Imperial Vienna Porcelain Manufactory). To establish a close connection between Anton Grassi and Mozart is an even bigger stretch than the inflation of Joseph Grassi's dancing activities in 1783 into an intimate friendship with the composer. The claim that "Letters[!] from Mozart indicate that Grassi’s brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart" is a false and ruthlessly dishonest statement. Grassi does not appear in "letters", but only in one of Mozart's letters to his father on 12 March 1783, where Mozart only reports that "a[sic!] painter (graßi)" appeared as Dottore in a pantomime at a masquerade ball. Any similarity to scholarship is purely coincidental. There is no proof that Grassi ever painted a portrait of Mozart. There is no proof that "Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother" or that "he attached the miniature". These claims are all based on reckless speculation. To quote from the NY Times:

One of the most famous portraits — and the one Mozart’s wife, Constanze, considered the most true to life — has long been considered unfinished. It is by Joseph Lange, Mozart’s brother-in-law, and shows him in profile, looking down, his face emerging from a dark background, with a triangle of torso surrounded by scratched white space. The painting, dating from 1789, without doubt looks unfinished, like a classical symphony of two movements.

Fact of the matter is that there is no proof at all that this painting dates from 1789 (contrary to Großpietsch's claim, Franz Segl's 1856 photograph proves absolutely nothing). This dating is based on a mere assumption. No research on Lange's oeuvre and the development of his artistic style has ever been undertaken by the Mozarteum. Quote:

X-ray and infrared analysis performed at the Doerner Institute in Munich, an art research institution, last December, showed that a small completed painting of Mozart’s head and shoulder had been trimmed and mounted at some point on a larger canvas, with paint added around the edges to smooth out the surface. The enlargement was unfinished, not the original.

This paragraph offers no new information at all. It just repeats my 2009 discovery which I published on 19 September 2012, under the title "Joseph Lange's Mozart Portrait" on this blog. When I told Ms. Ramsauer about my discovery in June 2010, I learnt with astonishment that the thought of submitting the painting to X-ray and infrared analysis had never occurred to the Mozarteum curators. Only after my suggestion, did they undertake said analysis which led to the "sensational" results about which the Mozarteum is now bragging. In February 2013, the Mozarteum had the audacity to send me the following statement: "Unfortunately at the time of our press release, we were unaware of the results regarding the Lange portrait that you had published on your blog, because contrary to practice in the scientific community you failed to inform us of a publication about objects from our collection that we had allowed you to consult." The Mozarteum, who employs a librarian for keeping their database of publications up to date, now tries to accuse me of not having properly reported my research. The claim that I "consulted" objects is plain nonsense. I only took a look at the Lange painting which I also could have done by simply visiting the museum, had they not removed the painting from the exhibition. Of course, I do not quarrel with the fact that with this media announcement regarding the Lange portrait the staff of the Mozarteum is now claiming a priority that is not really theirs. There are so many colleagues who witnessed my discovery back in 2009, that today I can actually lean back and watch the ongoing (and partly embarrassing) events with great amusement. I am proud of my pioneering vision that needed no X-ray analysis to discover the truth about Lange's Mozart portrait already four years ago.

Joseph Grassi's signature (which appears on none of his supposed "Mozart portraits")

© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2013

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Postscript (January 2014)

The document that according to the 2013 article in the New York Times, "said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for ten years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna" has still not been published by the Mozarteum. 

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Postscript (January 2015)

The document that according to the 2013 article in the New York Times, "said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for ten years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna" has still not been published by the Mozarteum.

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Postscript (May 2025)

In an essay entitled "Grassis Mozart Porträt. Die Revision einer Miniatur" (Mozart-Jahrbuch 2014, 257-93), in which all kinds of heavy props of scholarship were dragged onto the stage, Christoph Großpietsch presented the miniature in question as an "authentic Mozart portrait" by Grassi. To make matters worse, in this essay, the collector Aloys Fuchs was presented as the main witness to the authenticity of the miniature and was even referred to as a "manuscript expert." Fuchs was anything but an expert, and his many erroneous "expert opinions" demonstrably prove this. The most notorious example of Fuchs's incompetence is his erroneous opinion about the forged 1790 Schikaneder billet to Mozart "Lieber Wolffgang derweilen schicke ich dir dein Pa Pa Pa zurückh" (Wienbibliothek, H.I.N. 8355). Furthermore, Fuchs misidentified Freystädtler's counterpoint studies (A-Sm, Autogr Var 2) as "Mozarts eigenhändig geschriebene Uibungen"; and (to name only one of countless other examples) he "guaranteed the authenticity of the above musical notation of the great W. A. Mozart" of a fragment of the Church Sonata K. Anh. C 16.01 (US-NYpm, M9397.C559), which is actually a copy written by Leopold Mozart. However, even with the greatest effort, the two main obstacles to authenticating the miniature cannot be argued away: 1) The person depicted on the miniature bears no resemblance to Mozart, and 2) the painting technique and style of the miniature do not fit into Grassi’s oeuvre at all.

Joseph Lange's Mozart Portrait

Joseph Lange's unfinished portrait of Mozart is one of the most popular and best known images of the composer. Its somber coloring and its unfinished state have made it a visual icon of Mozart in his Vienna years. Mozart's life, being tragically cut short, is hauntingly paraphrased by the  incompleteness of the painting.

And yet, Mozart scholarship does not even know for sure when Mozart's brother-in-law painted this portrait. In 1913, Edward J. Dent claimed that it originates from 1791. After having met sharp criticism from Téodor de Wyzewa in a review in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and Edward Speyer, Dent, in a later edition of his book Mozart's Operas, corrected the dating to 1782. In an article in the 1926 Salzburger Museumsblätter, art historian Julius Leisching assigned the Lange portrait to 1790. This dating did not gain acceptance either, and in 1931, Roland Tenschert, in his book Mozart. Ein Künstlerleben in Bildern und Dokumenten, presented the portrait as having been painted in 1782. Otto Erich Deutsch seems to have pondered for several decades over a possible dating of  Lange's work. In 1956, he dated the portrait with "winter of 1782-83", curiously describing it as "a sketch in oils, unfortunately never completed". This dating was influenced by the assumption that Lange's portrait of Mozart was somehow related to his portrait of Constanze Mozart which, since 1931, belongs to the University of Glasgow as part of the Zavertal Collection, and is presumed to have been one of the two small portraits that Mozart sent to his father on 3 April 1783: "Auch folgen die 2 Portraits; – wünsche nur daß sie damit zufrieden seyn möchten; mir scheint sie gleichen beyde gut, und alle die es gesehen sind der nemlichen Meynung." ("The two portraits will follow; – I only wish that you will be pleased with them. I think they are both good likenesses and all who have seen them are of the same opinion."). Within the next five years, however, Deutsch changed his opinion again, and in his 1961 book Mozart und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern (published as part of the NMA), he assigned the Lange portrait to 1782/83. Since then, this dating has been revised by Mozart scholarship to 1789, based on Mozart's remark in a letter to his wife from 16 April 1789: "ich möchte gerne wissen ob schwager Hofer den Tag nach meiner Abreise gekommen ist? ob er öfters kommt, so wie er mir versprochen hat; – ob die Langischen bisweilen kommen? – ob an den Portrait fortgearbeitet wird?" ("I want to know if brother-in-law Hofer visited the day after my departure? If he is visiting more often, as he promised me; – Whether the Langes come by now and then? – If work on the portrait is being continued?")

I have been studying Joseph Lange's life and work for over ten years and I assume in all modesty that I have seen more of Lange's paintings than anybody else. Lange's Mozart portrait has been the object of my scrutiny for a long time and I have always been intrigued as to how its appearance and its state of preservation have changed during the last 60 years. Moreover, I was always sceptic regarding its supposed "state of incompleteness", which, owing to the unusually straight edges of paint on Mozart's body, is at odds with many other unfinished paintings I know. Could it be that the painting was not unfinished, but represents an enlargement of an orignal small portrait which then was never completed? There is a model for this particular procedure: Lange's portrait of Constanze Mozart which today is on display in Glasgow. That this painting is an enlarged version of a small portrait (previously 18 x 13 cm, now 32,3 x 24,8 cm) has long been known and has been pointed out several times in the literature, most recently in the catalog of the 1991 Mozart exhibition in Salzburg. The irregular size of the original portrait (as shown approximately in the following picture) was caused by cutting and the obviously bad state of canvas quality on the lower left corner of the original painting. The enlargement was either sewn or glued to the original painting after it had been turned about eleven degrees to the right.

The difference of color between the old and the new canvas becomes visible with the picture's histogram being modified.

It is not known when the Constanze portrait was enlarged. Old black and white photographs, taken before a very intensive restoration of Mozart's portrait in the early 1960s, show that the painting underwent a similar treatment as the painting in Glasgow: a miniature, showing only Mozart's head, was turned about four degrees to the right and inserted into a bigger canvas which was supposed to show Mozart's upper body and the shape of a piano, but later remained unfinished. A photograph of the unrestored painting (in deplorable state of conservation), taken in 1946, eerily shows the distinct contour of the original small painting:

Lange's painting in 1946 (photograph by David E. Scherman)

The pre-restoration state of the painting is also documented in Roland Tenschert's article entitled "Wie Mozart wirklich aussah", which in 1941 was published in the Austrian journal Die Bühne.

Die Bühne, Heft 24/1941, 7

The original miniature, about 19 x 15 centimeters in size, looked like this (in exact size relation to the colored picture above):

In March 2009, I realized that the portrait is an enlargement, a discovery whose date can be attested by several colleague musicologists. On 29 June 2010, I visited Mozart's birthplace and examined the Lange portrait, which at that time, had been taken from the exhibition to be scrutinized by the museum staff. I told Dr. Großpietsch and Dr. Ramsauer about my hypothesis and had to realize that there was no scholarly documentation on the 1963 restoration of the painting, and the Mozarteum had never X-rayed the portrait. The restoration, of course, has rendered the visible distinction between the original minature and the enlargement almost imperceptible. Not only was the gaping horizontal crack, which is visible on old photographs, filled with putty, the edge of the brown paint at the lower end of the painted area on Mozart's chest was also horizontally adjusted, as if to hide the tilted original miniature.

Lange's portrait of Mozart before and after the restoration (which, according to a personal communication by Dr. Ramsauer, was done in 1963).

Given the current state of the painting, the different canvas of the small original portrait is only discernible as a slightly lower rectangular area, when looked upon in a very flat angle in backlight. Therefore I concluded that in the course of the enlargement the small painting was mounted from behind to the larger canvas. The Mozart portrait by Joseph Lange is not an unfinished painting of "Mozart at the Piano", but an unfinished enlargement of an original miniature of Mozart's head.

What are the implications of this discovery? The original miniature portraits of Mozart and his wife, painted by Lange, both of which were later enlarged, could well be the two small paintings that Mozart sent to his father in April 1783. The Mozart miniature portrait from 1782/83 is "lost", because for over 200 years, it has been hidden in plain sight in the supposedly unfinished painting of Mozart at the piano. Constanze's small portrait was successfully resized, while the enlargement of Mozart's portrait – at some time sent back to Vienna – was never completed. That Lange had not finished the work by 1812 may well have been caused by the fact that at this time he had long separated from Constanze's sister and had started a third family with a woman 30 years his junior. The enlargement with the addition of the piano could have been the work Mozart was referring to in his 1789 letter from Dresden ("an den Portrait fortgearbeitet"). Recently, some pseudo-scholars tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Lange portrait. Their aim was twofold: first, to boost the credibility of the so-called Hagenauer Mozart which simply does not resemble the man on Lange's painting. And second, to add probability to the absurd idea that "the man in the red frock" could have been the small portrait that Mozart sent to Salzburg in 1783. One proponent of this crude hypothesis even went so far as to visualize Mozart wearing a pigtail on the Lange portrait, which (original quote) "can't be seen because of the chiaroscuro[sic!]".

An engraving by Carl Pfeiffer after a self-portrait by Lange from around 1820

As a portraitist Joseph Lange was one of the best eighteenth-century amateur painters I have come across. He enjoyed a first rate education at the Vienna Academy of Arts and his technique, his shading, his mixture of skin tones was (considering his amateur status) highly professional. I have never seen any reproduction of the Salzburg Mozart portrait that really does justice to the artistry of color and glazing technique of the original. Contrary to a wide-spread misconception, caused by an entry in Joachim Daniel Preisler's diary, Lange did not give up painting in 1788, but diligently pursued this activity into his old age. Many of Lange's paintings, such as the group portrait of his mistress Therese Koch (1780–1851) and her three daughters, are still extant in the possession of Lange's descendants. Among the many amazing portraits by Lange, the following is my favorite. P. Maurus (Franz Borgius) Stützinger (b. 6 January 1775, in Gmunden, d. 7 August 1842, in Salzburg) was elected abbot of Lambach Abbey in 1812. In 1820, he was deposed owing to the abbey's complete bankruptcy. Joseph Lange's life-sized portrait of Pater Maurus Stützinger was painted in 1815:

Joseph Lange's official seal and signature

Joseph Lange's private seal

© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2012. All rights reserved.

Updated: 20 July 2019

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Postscript (January 2013)

In January 2013, the Mozarteum issued a press release regarding "sensational discoveries" in Mozart portraiture which is fraught with misinformation and grossly false statements. 1) The "Boy with the Bird's Nest" (attributed to Zoffany) "does not show Mozart and is a fake". The truth is: that it does not show Mozart had been known to art historians for ages. The painting is not a fake, but a misattribution by wishful "experts" who already existed at the Mozarteum back in 1925. 2) "The 'Unfinished Lange portrait' had been already finished before it was enlarged which has been proven by X-ray analysis." The truth is: this fact was uncovered by me back in March 2009, without the use of X-ray, and the analysis was done following my suggestion to Dr. Ramsauer on 30 June 2010. To nobody's surprise, my name and my breakthrough discovery is now being ignored by the Mozarteum. 3) "The miniature on ivory on a tobacco box definitely shows Mozart" (quote: "Nun ist es sicher!"). The truth is: this miniature has already been dealt with by the Munich historian Dr. Richard Bauer in 2008, in his excellent book Das rekonstruierte Antlitz. Scrutinizing the sources, Bauer came to the conclusion that the portrait is posthumous and "is meant to show Mozart". Of course, Bauer's prior achievement is not mentioned by the Mozarteum experts, and half of their comments on the genesis of this portrait is simply inaccurate. And finally, 4) "Boßler's silhouette of 'Signor Mozart' was done in Mozart's lifetime." Yes, but we knew that already.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, engraving by Heinrich Philipp Boßler after an own silhouette (Beethoven-Haus Bonn, B 2275)

Mozart Documents "transcribed"

The probate file of Mozart's estate, the so-called Sperrs=Relation, drawn up by the civil court of the Vienna Magistrate right after the composer's death, is one of the most important of all Mozart documents. It gives an exact list of the close relatives of the deceased, his possessions, and assets, together with his debts and receivables. It was legally obligatory to draw up the belongings of a deceased person to be able to put it under restraint (Sperr) to forstall any possible missappropriation of the estate. Every Sperrs=Relation had a two-folio cover sheet (the so-called Mantelbogen) with preprinted standard paragraphs that had to be filled out by the official of the court (the so-called Sperrskommissär). The first page of Mozart's probate file (A-Wsa, HA, Persönlichkeiten M14.1) looks as follows.

In 1961, Otto Erich Deutsch published his book Mozart. Die Dokumente seines Lebens, a voluminous 600-page collection of Mozart documents. The publication of this fundamental work was not just Deutsch's personal enterprise. The biggest collection of Mozart documents so far was published as Supplement, Werkgruppe 34 of Serie X of the "New Mozart Edition", i.e. a part of the project Mozart. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke. Thus, on one of its title pages this book bears the following quality seal: "En coopération avec le Conseil international de la Musique. Editionsleitung: Wolfgang Plath Wolfgang Rehm". When we look at Deutsch's transcription of Mozart's probate file, however (and this is only one of countless examples in this collection), it soon becomes obvious that something is deeply amiss. Not only does Deutsch's edition not meet the basic standards of scholarship, because it fails to provide a description of the formal structure of the source and a usable shelf mark; we also realize that, having no palaeographic education at all, Deutsch (a university dropout without any academic training) was completely unfamiliar with the official terms in an eighteenth-century document of a Viennese court of law. His knowledge of the German vocabulary in legal documents of this kind was insufficient and his expertise in Latin and the frequently applied abbreviations of terms in this language was basically non-existent. Since Deutsch's transcription of the text on the cover sheet of the Sperrs=Relation alone contains about 25 mistakes, it is obvious that he never even saw the original document and blindly relied on the work of two archivists of the Vienna Municipal Archives, namely Rudolf Geyer and Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau, to whom he gives credit in a footnote "for their help with the transcription". Deutsch's aversion to all research for which he actually had to leave his apartment at Böcklinstraße 26 is legendary. In the course of his Mozart and Schubert research, he demonstrably never visited a Viennese parish archive or the Vienna City Archive which was then located at Vienna's city hall. Deutsch either ignores the abbreviation "mpia" (for manu propria) altogether, or mistranscribes it as "Mag.", and he actually mistakes the small title page of the twice-folded Mantelbogen on fol. 4v for a rubrum. Page two of Mozart's probate file contains the following preprinted paragraphs that were filled out by the Sperrskommissär.

Deutsch's transcription of the above text concerning Mozart's two minor children – note that Franz Xaver was already called "Wolfgang" as an infant – and the existence of a will or a comparable legal document (like a marriage contract) is a fine example of one of his countless palaeographical failures. Deutsch begins the transcription of the first handwritten passage as follows: "2[!] Bübl:[sic!]  als: Karl 7. Jahr". The word "Bübl" (boys), which was never used by a Sperrskommissär, is of course complete nonsense. The entry reads "Leibl:[iche] als:" (legitimate [children] the following). The next entry is garbled by Deutsch in the following way: "Keines,[!] doch ein Heuraths Brief Act = 3 = Aug: 782." This is a true highpoint of ignorance. One could accept the missing semicolon, but any serious scholar, who has ever worked with eighteenth-century Viennese administrative documents, can recognize and transcribe the abbreviation "dd°" (with the small superscript "o" being doubly underlined) which means de dato (i.e. dating from). And the second one of Deutsch's absurd double dashes is simply the double underscore of the superscript abbreviation "t[er]", belonging to the "3" which is the date of Mozart's marriage contract. Mistakes of such grotesque scale in a volume of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, which is supposed to represent a final and authoritative edition of the sources, are simply breathtaking. And the situation becomes even more absurd, given the fact that this document had been published several times in a much less flawed (and "Bübl"-less) version, decades before Deutsch dealt with it. Arthur Schurig published part of the Sperrs=Relation in his book Constanze Mozart: Briefe, Aufzeichnungen, Dokumente 1782 bis 1842, (Dresden 1922), and published it a second time in the second edition of his book Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sein Leben, seine Persönlichkeit, sein Werk, (Leipzig 1923). Albert Leitzmann also published much less flawed excerpts from this document in his collection Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Berichte der Zeitgenossen und Briefe, (Leipzig 1926). The funniest detail is that Deutsch was fully aware of these earlier publications. He refers to them in his commentary at the end of his own transcription where he proudly points out that "contrary to all the earlier editions this one is complete" – which of course it is not.

The story does not end here. For several years now, the Salzburg Mozarteum has been working on a project titled "Briefe und Aufzeichnungen zu W. A. Mozart und seiner Familie aus den Beständen der Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg". The goal of this project, which is being funded by the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos/California, is the online publication of all letters and documents related to the Mozart family, as well as related letters and documents spanning from 1740 (when Leopold Mozart arrived in Salzburg) to 1881 (when the International Mozarteum Foundation was established). The list of documents published so far provides a fascinating glimps into the blissfully complacent world of the Mozarteum. The online publication of the documents is marred by several problems and a literal ocean of mistranscriptions awaits the interested reader. Many of these hidden howlers are true gems and the fun they provide almost lets one forget that this kind of dilettantism is draining huge amounts of money away from scholarship that could  put generous funding to a much better use. Note, for instance, the poor "Frau Schupfer", appearing in this document, who was recklessly turned into a "Frau Söhupfer", because none of the people in charge know how a small "c" is written in Kurrentschrift.

Frau Schupfer, turned into "Frau Söhupfer", in the transcription of anonymous notes from after 1836 concerning Salzburg citizens who could possibly own Mozart autographs (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Bibliotheca Mozartiana)

The transcriptions that are shown beside the pictures apply a ridiculously unpractical set of "Kürzel" signs (the Mozarteum calls them "Abbreviatur-Schleifen") instead of bracketed completions of the words which sometimes turn the reading of these transcriptions (such as Mozart's letter of 27 March 1770 from Bologna) into a mind-boggling experience. The fact that some transcriptions contain the term "unleserlich" (illegible) is all the more frustrating, considering the small size and the weak resolution of the pictures that make it impossible for the reader to decipher the document on his own.

On 7 December 1787, Joseph II appointed Mozart k.k. Kammermusikus. The decree signed by Johann Thorwart (who in 1782 had been Constanze Weber's witness at her wedding) looks as follows.

Aktenstück, 1787-12-07 (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Bibliotheca Mozartiana)

What kind of transcription of this document does David Woodley Packard get for his money? It turns out that the text of this decree, as presented on the Mozarteum website, is neither new nor is it flawless. The money was new and flawless alright, but the transcription is an exact copy right out of Deutsch's flawed 1961 edition of the Mozart-Dokumente. All the typical symptoms of Deutschian perplexity are still there: the Mozarteum's transcriber (or rather copyist) does not resolve the abbreviations (not even in the print version). Just like Deutsch, he still mistakes the "p." at the end of the headline for an "etc.", and the meaning of "Pr." at the beginning of the closing formula is still a mystery. Needless to say that this document has already been published several times by Jahn, Schurig, Tenschert and Mueller von Asow. Sometimes even in better readings.

See also: Mozart Documents "transcribed" (follow-up) 

© Dr. Michael Lorenz 2012. All rights reserved.

Updated: 4 January 2022