Mozart more of a prince than a pauper

Different weight class... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was even better than Bono, but had a face like a lunar maria
in Berlin
Wed 5 Apr 2006 05.36 EDT

For centuries he has been portrayed as an impoverished genius, who wrote begging letters to his mates and ended up in a pauper's grave. But far from being hard up, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived a solidly upper-crust life and was among the top earners in eighteenth century Vienna, a new exhibition claims.

Letters show that the composer repeatedly scrounged money from friends to pay for his travels, and that his family was forced to move at least 11 times; but documents on display at Vienna's musical society, the Musikverein, reveal that he earned 10,000 florins a year, a huge sum.

"His income put him in the top 5% of the population," Otto Biba, the exhibition's curator, told the Guardian yesterday. "During this period you could lead a very comfortable upper-class life on 500 florins a year. A labourer earned just 25 florins a year."

"The 21st century needs to rescue Mozart from the lingering 19th century romantic image of him as a struggling artist. The truth is that Mozart was a genius, but a genius who earned lots of money towards the end of his life.

"Sometimes he had heavy debts too. It must have been through gaming; there isn't proof, but there is no other explanation."

Mozart earned income by giving piano lessons and concerts and working as a private imperial musician. He had a billiard table and regularly visited his hairdresser. He also had a generous parking space for his carriage and lived for most of his time in Vienna in a seven-room apartment next to the cathedral, the exhibition shows.

The documents on display include an invoice for 800 florins received by Mozart from his royal patron Joseph II. In another letter, Mozart's father Leopold boasts that his son had just earned 1,000 florins for a single concert. "It's incredible," Mozart senior wrote.

The composer lived in Vienna between 1781 and 1791, the year of his death at 35. Although legend has it that he was buried in a pauper's grave, the reality was that he was interred in a regular communal grave in accordance with contemporary practice, Mr Biba said.

The exhibition, Mozart: A Composer in Vienna, opened yesterday and runs until June 30 at the Musikverein. It displays bills and receipts from the last decade of his life, and is part of a year of events in Austria celebrating the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth in Salzburg on January 27 1756.