_Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart_
If the Mozartean family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of
the Bachs it was still not without striking features. There were Mozarts
in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century; and as
remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne. To
be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times. It
appeared as “Mosshard,” “Motzhart,” “Mozert,” and in still other
variants. Bernhard Paumgartner, Director of the Salzburg Mozarteum,
thinks it derived from the old German root _mod_, or _muot_, from which
came the word _Mut_ (courage). Be this as it may, German “Mozarts” were
anything but exceptional a couple of hundred years before Leopold Mozart
or his son, Wolfgang, came into the picture. In Augsburg there was an
Anton Mozart who painted landscapes “in the manner of Breughel.” Another
Mozart from the same town, one Johann Michael, was a sculptor, who in
1687 moved to Vienna and became an Austrian citizen.
But of all these “Mossherts,” “Motards,” and the rest, only one, the
mason apprentice David Motzert, born in the village of Pfersee, close to
Augsburg, really belongs to our story. The _Augsburger Bürgerbuch_ of
1643 mentions him and sets his fortune at 100 florins. By his marriage
with the _Jungfer_ Maria Negeler he was to become the
great-great-grandfather of the creator of _Don Giovanni_. In the
fullness of time David’s grandson, Johann Georg, abandoned the
occupation of his forebears for that of a bookbinder. His second wife
blessed him with two daughters and six sons. One of these sons, Franz
Aloys, gained a kind of immortality as the father of Maria Anna Thekla,
Wolfgang’s cousin, the “Bäsle,” to whom he wrote that series of
notoriously smutty letters with which this lively young lady’s name is
eternally linked.
Johann Georg’s first-born, Johann Georg Leopold, became for posterity
simply Leopold Mozart, composer of arid music, author of a celebrated
violin method, and father of Wolfgang and of Maria Anna Walburga
Ignatia, whom the world remembers almost solely as “Nannerl.” It is a
Nannerl, incidentally, that we have to look for a sort of continuation
of the Mozart line down almost to our own time. On January 9, 1919,
there died in the Feldhof Insane Asylum, near Graz, the
seventy-seven-year-old Bertha Forschter, a great-granddaughter of
Nannerl, who had lived on in Salzburg til 1829, highly revered because
of her exalted kinship.