From left: director Mozart-Museums Linus Klumpner, Ulrich Leisinger, director of research, president Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg and general manager Rainer Heneis © Wolfgang Lienbacher

The International Mozarteum Foundation has been in existence for almost 150 years, but there have been few acquisitions during this time as important as the present one: twelve original holographs in the hand of members of the Mozart family that were previously in the collection of Hans Joachim Eggers and that have now found their way into the Foundation’s collection of manuscripts, most of them by way of donation. All are priceless documents that allow us to paint an even clearer picture of Mozart’s fascinating personality. They include the only manuscript copy of Mozart’s Miserere KV 85 from 1770 preserved here in the hand of Leopold Mozart. Also included are two of Mozart’s own letters: one that he wrote to his sister in 1787 dealing with their late father’s estate; and one from 1778, in which he mentioned Aloisia Weber, his first great love, for the first time. This love remained unrequited.

Every Mozart admirer dreams of building up a collection of original manuscripts in the hands of Wolfgang Amadé and Leopold Mozart. This is a dream that came true for the Cologne virologist Hans Joachim Eggers (1927–2016), who began acquiring Mozart manuscripts at auctions in 1975, exactly fifty years ago. Thirty years later he owned the largest private collection of Mozart manuscripts that anyone had been able to assemble in Germany or Austria since the end of the Second World War. Eggers was a modest man, and so his collection remained hidden from the eyes of the wider world. He attended the Mozart Week Festival over a period of many years and in that way formed a bond with Salzburg and with the International Mozarteum Foundation. Thanks to the kindness of his descendants twelve items from this unique collection have now been acquired by the Mozarteum Foundation, mostly in the form of donations. This is the largest addition to what is already the world’s most substantial collection of letters and documents relating to the Mozart family since the bequests made by Mozart’s two sons, Carl Thomas and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, in the course of the nineteenth century.

Many of the treasures from the Eggers Collection will be seen in public for the first time at a special exhibition, Magnificent Premiere: The Mozart Autographs from the Eggers Collection, which may be seen in the Mozart Residence in Salzburg till 1 February 2026.

The letters, documents, and music manuscripts are available to anyone interested in studying them in detail in digital form at the Bibliotheca Mozartiana → Eggers Collection

Comm. & Réd. partir-magazine.com