Mozarthaus Vienna

Historic · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

The one Vienna flat Mozart rented that still stands, four bare rooms behind the cathedral where he wrote The Marriage of Figaro.

Mozarthaus Vienna is the one flat Mozart rented in this city that still stands. He moved in one floor up in late September 1784 and stayed until the spring of 1787, longer than at any other address here. It had four rooms, two small cabinets and a kitchen, and the museum calls it the largest and most expensive home he ever rented. He wrote The Marriage of Figaro in it, which is why Vienna still calls the building the Figaro house. He also finished here the last three of six string quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn, the older composer he called his dearest friend. What you walk into is bare. Nothing he owned survived, so the rooms hold period furniture that was never his and a modern copy of an early piano. Only the building itself is original, including plaster ceilings that were already old when he moved in. Two floors above are panels, screens and recordings about his Vienna, and chamber concerts are played in the vaulted cellar.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start at the top of the building and work down — The displays go from the Vienna he lived in to the music he wrote, so you reach the empty flat already knowing who was in it.
Come in the first hour after opening — The flat is a string of small rooms, and one tour group of twenty fills it end to end, which turns a quiet visit into a shuffle.
Read Leopold Mozart's letters from Vienna before you come — Mozart's father stayed in this flat for ten weeks in 1785 and wrote home about the household in it, and the Mozarteum Foundation publishes the letters online.
Do not look for the house where he died — Mozart moved home more than ten times in Vienna, and the building he died in was demolished; a department store stands there.

Things to do

1
Stand where Haydn heard the new quartets
The museum labels no music room, so stop in the largest one and picture stands, parts and a handful of listeners. On 12 February 1785 Joseph Haydn sat here through three of those quartets. Afterwards he told Mozart's father that before God he considered his son the greatest composer he knew of.
2
Look up at the one surface he also saw
Look up. The white relief on the ceilings and the painting on the upper walls were made for Albert Camesina, the court plasterer who bought the house in 1719. His family still owned it when Mozart signed the lease sixty-five years later, which makes this the only decoration in the flat he also looked at.