Eloquence Classics

Mozart was brought up at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and the music of the Roman Catholic liturgy was central to his early experience. Salzburg had its own ecclesiastical musical traditions, dating back well into the seventeenth century with such men as Andreas Hofer, Heinrich Biber and Georg Muffat; more immediately relevant to Mozart, however, were Johann Ernst Eberlin, court organist and Kapellmeister in the middle of the eighteenth century (whose work he is known to have admired), his own father, Leopold Mozart, and Michael Haydn, who held a court appointment at Salzburg from the early 1760s. He had plenty of models; and indeed work by Eberlin, Michael Haydn and Leopold Mozart which he copied out were long taken to be his own.