This year Austria is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth, on 27 January 1756, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest composers of all time. In Salzburg, the city of his birth, celebrations include performances of all of his operas; in Vienna, celebrations under the banner of Mozart Year 2006 are taking place, including substantial exhibitions at the refurbished house in the Domgasse near the cathedral, where he wrote Figaro, and a comprehensive exhibition at the Albertina Art Gallery: ‘The Enlightenment: An Experiment’. The Austrian Post Office has issued a commemorative set of postage stamps depicting Masonic artefacts, and Mozart at his lodge in Vienna.
    Mozart was the youngest child and only surviving son of Leopold Mozart, who was himself a distinguished musician. But Leopold was a dictatorial man, not easy to get on with, as can be seen from the extensive correspondence between father and son, and he was also ruthless in promoting his young prodigy. Wolfgang travelled the length and breadth of Europe as a very young man, playing in many courts and distinguished venues under the guidance of his father. Before the age of ten he had visited Munich, Augsburg, Milan, Naples, Paris and London. Mozart’s mother died while travelling with him in Paris, in 1778 when he was 22 years old, and this was a bitter blow to the young man. Eventually he married Constanze Weber, without his father’s approval, whilst in Vienna.
    This signalled the point at which Mozart seemed to shake off the overbearing influence of his domineering father. His marriage to Constanze marked not only a break with his father, but with much of his past life. Up to this time, he had been Concert Master in Prince-Bishop Colloredo’s entourage in Salzburg, but his move to Vienna then gave Mozart an entrée to a bustling imperial capital of over 200,000 people, of whom no less than 600 described themselves in the census as ‘composer’.
    Mozart found that he was able to cross the social divide and mix freely and to get work, the highest-paid in society. His fee from a single concert equalled half his annual salary in Salzburg. His status also improved, as he wrote to his father: ‘All possible honour is shown me’ and he eventually, in 1787, became Court Chamber Musician, as a result of which a substantial corpus of delightful minuets, German dance and contredanse written for the Court balls has come down to us.

Freemasonry and Viennese Society

Mozart was proposed, and initiated, in the Lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit (Beneficence) in December 1784, and passed to the second degree in the Lodge Zur Wahren Eintracht (True Concord) in January 1785. This was the most prestigious Austrian lodge of all. Shortly after that, he was raised to the third degree. In his letter On Genuine Concord, addressed to the Vienna Lodge, Mozart confessed ‘It has always been my ardent wish to join the ranks of those who set themselves as the goal of their endeavour to work for the enlightenment and well-being of their neighbours – I am confident to have found in Freemasonry exactly such people striving for the triumph of good’.
    The Empress Maria Theresa’s husband was a Freemason although she disapproved of Freemasonry: she nevertheless chose to ignore the Papal edict outlawing Freemasonry, as impinging on her imperial authority. When she died and Josef II acceded to the throne as sole ruler in 1780, several years of liberalisation ensued, but on 11 December 1785 an imperial ordinance on the control of Freemasonry was announced to limit the number of Viennese Lodges. Eight Viennese Freemason lodges were condensed into three and were obliged to submit their membership lists and the minutes of the proceedings periodically to the police. The lodge Beneficence had to restart as the Lodge Zur Neugekrönten Hoffnung (New Crowned Hope) together with the lodge Crowned Hope and the lodge Three Flames. This ordinance had a great impact not only on Freemasonry in Vienna but also on Mozart himself, since his own lodge was dissolved, and he had to join the new composite lodge, New Crowned Hope. Whilst it has been estimated that some 80 percent of the Austrian higher bureaucracy were masons at this time, the number of masons in Vienna decreased from 950 in 1785 to 350 in 1786.

Freemasonry and the Enlightenment Society

The impact of Freemasonry on Enlightenment Society cannot be overestimated. The French dramatist and Freemason Beaumarchais’ play Figaro, having been banned in Paris, was performed as an opera by Mozart in 1786, several years prior to the French Revolution. Significantly, but also most poignantly, it reveals a profound change in social attitudes which arguably resulted from masonic influence, when the Count humbly kneels before his Countess in front of all his staff – unheardof in the contemporary social context – and sings Perdono Contessa (Forgive me Countess) for having humiliated her in front of the staff. We have here a hint of the social levelling which was yet to come.
    The central meeting place of the Viennese intelligentsia in the 1790s was the Lodge True Concord, the lodge in which Mozart had been passed to the second degree. In 1781 the distinguished metallurgist, actor-manager and director Ignaz von Born, became the Master of this lodge. He was advisor to Freemason Emanuel Schickaneder, who wrote the libretto of The Magic Flute, and who played the part of Papageno in the first performance. From shortly after Mozart’s death until the conclusion of World War I, Freemasonry was forbidden in Austria, and so for a period of more than 120 years Viennese society turned its back on the Craft.

Masonic Music

Communal music plays an important part in many masonic gatherings: some influential composers, notably Liszt, Sibelius and Haydn were Freemasons. Sibelius was the only composer other than Mozart to have written anything of masonic significance.
    Having been initiated in 1784, Mozart was only a Freemason for seven of his thirty-five years, but wrote a considerable body of masonic music. Whilst in Salzburg, there had been considerable religious output for Prince- Bishop Colloredo, the Archbishop of Salzburg, but as Mozart was not affiliated to any church in Vienna, he concentrated instead on Freemasonry after arriving there.
    Masonic influences are alluded to in many of Mozart’s works, but some of those more important specifically composed for Freemasonry are:
    - Gesellenreise (Fellow Craft’s Journey, K.468). Brother Franz Joseph v. Ratschky’s verse on the journey to greater knowledge, first performed in Lodge True Concord on 16 April 1785 for Mozart’s father’s Fellowcraft Degree. Die ihr einem neuen Grade (You who are proceeding to a new degree).

You, who now are risen higher Unto Wisdom’s high abode, Wander steadfast, higher, higher Know, it is the noblest road. Only spirit without blight May approach the source of Light.

With clasped hands, Brethren, let us end this work in sounds of glad rejoicing.
May this bond tightly embrace the entire globe as it does this holy place.
To honour virtue and mankind, and teach ourselves and others love, let our first duty ever be.
Then not in the east alone will light shine, not in the west alone, but also in the south and in the north.