Rauhensteingasse: Site of Mozart's Death
Why is it significant?
Rauhensteingasse is an ordinary side street of shop entrances and office windows, and the building at the corner is a modern department store. Nothing here looks like a shrine.
Key Facts
| Place | Rauhensteingasse: Site of Mozart's Death |
|---|---|
| Address | Rauhensteingasse 8, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20630, 16.37250 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna in Three-Quarter Time: Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and the City of Music |
| Generated | Generated |
Rauhensteingasse is an ordinary side street of shop entrances and office windows, and the building at the corner is a modern department store. Nothing here looks like a shrine. Yet on this spot stood the house where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, shortly before one in the morning on 5 December 1791, at the age of 35.
Mozart moved here with his wife Constanze and their family in 1790, into an apartment in a house known as the Small Imperial House. It was a respectable address, not a garret. The image of Mozart as a starving pauper is largely a later legend; he earned well, spent faster and borrowed from friends, but in his last year he was working at astonishing speed and his prospects were improving.
Look at that last year. In a few months he wrote The Magic Flute, which premiered at Schikaneder's theatre on 30 September, the opera La clemenza di Tito for a coronation in Prague, and the Clarinet Concerto. And he began a Requiem, commissioned anonymously through a messenger. The patron turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg, who planned to present it as his own work in memory of his young wife.
In November Mozart fell ill, swollen and feverish, and took to his bed in the apartment that stood here. The story goes that on his last afternoon friends sang through parts of the unfinished Requiem beside him. The cause of death is still debated; the tale that his rival Antonio Salieri poisoned him is a legend, spread long after, and made famous by the film Amadeus. He was buried in a simple grave in St. Marx cemetery, and the exact spot is unknown.
His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the Requiem so that Constanze could deliver it and be paid. The house itself was demolished in the nineteenth century, and today only a plaque marks the place. Now walk south-east through the narrow streets to the Seilerstätte, where a palace is full of sound.