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The two main labels that have been used to describe the nationality of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are "Austrian" and "German". However, in Mozart's own life, those terms were used differently from the way they are used today, because the modern nation states of Austria and Germany did not yet exist. Any decision to label Mozart as "Austrian" or "German" (or neither) involves political boundaries, history, language, culture, and Mozart's own views. Editors of modern encyclopedias and other reference sources differ in how they assign a nationality to Mozart (if any) in light of conflicting criteria.Scholarly practice
The scholars who prepare biographies and reference works have made varying choices in assigning Mozart a nationality.
The widely consulted Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls Mozart an Austrian composer, as do the Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography (2003), the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music (Bourne & Kennedy (2004)) and the NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music (Libbey 2006). The practice of the Encyclopædia Britannica is split: the brief anonymous summary ("Micropedia") article calls him Austrian, but the main article ("Macropedia"), written by H. C. Robbins Landon, makes no mention of a nationality.
Sources describing Mozart as German are more abundant in earlier work, particularly before the founding of the modern nation-state of Austria in 1918. A London newspaper, reporting the composer's death in 1791, referred to him as "the celebrated German composer". In Lieber & et al. (1832), 78, Mozart is introduced as "the great German composer"; Ferris (1891) included Mozart in a book called The Great German Composers. Other descriptions of Mozart as German appear in Kerst (1906), 3, Mathews & Liebling (1896), and MacKey & Haywood (1909); also (much later) Hermand & Steakley (1981).
Sources have sometimes changed their practice over time. The Grove dictionary did not always call Mozart "Austrian"; the designation appears to have been added with the first edition of the "New Grove" in 1980. Similarly, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians did not originally offer a nationality but added the word "Austrian" to its opening sentence for the 8th edition (1992) and has retained it since. The Encyclopædia Britannica, now an "Austrian" source, listed Mozart as a German composer in 1911.Peter Branscombe's brief biography (2006, 304) begins with the description "composer and keyboard player"—in an encyclopedia that otherwise always specifies the nationality of composers, suggesting a deliberate omission of nationality. Other authors who say nothing about Mozart's nationality (whether deliberately or not) are Hermann Abert, Maynard Solomon, and Robbins Landon, mentioned above; and among encyclopedias the Riemann Musiklexikon (1961), and the International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1985). The prestigious German music encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart lists no nationality, but this follows the policy it applies to all composers.
Some sources mention both nationalities: the Brockhaus Riemann Musik Lexikon (1975) begins its article "composer, on the father's side of Augsburg-south German ancestry; on the mother's side Salzburg-Austrian". Julian Rushton, in his Mozart biography, summarizes many of the facts given above and concludes: "Mozart, by modern criteria Austrian, counted himself a German composer."
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