The priciest years

The narrow lane you're standing in is the Domgasse, and behind the wide door of number five lies the one home of Mozart's that this city still has. Of the ten or so addresses he rented here, this is the last one left standing.

 

He moved in with his wife Constanze in 1784, and with four rooms, two cabinets and a kitchen on the first floor, it was a showily expensive address for a musician with no steady job.

 

He could afford it, because these were his best years. He put on his own concerts, had pupils who paid well, and in a single season earned more than a senior civil servant made in a year. At this table he wrote the opera about a servant who outwits his master, in a city where that was a politically loaded subject.

 

Joseph Haydn, the composer, came here one evening to play string quartets, and afterwards told Mozart's father, who was visiting, that his son was the greatest composer he knew. Leopold proudly passed it on to his daughter that same week.

 

Three years later the money had run out, and the family moved to the outskirts, where the rents were lower.

 

We follow the lane out to the Singerstraße and keep to the large gateway building on the left.