page_title: Mozart family grand tour
section_title: Early stages (July–November 1763)
hierarchical_section_title: Mozart family grand tour / Grand tour / Early stages (July–November 1763)
caption_attribution_description: English: Infos: Painting commissioned by Leopold Mozart. Mozart is six years old. Both children are in court costumes given to them in 1762 at the Imperial Court in Vienna. The painter executed these by first painting the surroundings and clothing, and only then having the children pose. Español: Retrato encargado por Leopold Mozart. Mozart tiene seis años. Ambos niños llevan vestidos de corte, las cual recibieron de la Corte Imperial en Viena. El pintor hizo estas imágenes pintando primeramente las alrededores y la ropa. Después posaban los niños para el retrato.
context_page_description: The Mozart family grand tour was a journey through western Europe, undertaken by Leopold Mozart, his wife Anna Maria, and their musically gifted children Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus from 1763 to 1766. At the start of the tour the children were aged eleven and seven respectively. Their extraordinary skills had been demonstrated during a visit to Vienna in 1762, when they had played before the Empress Maria Theresa at the Imperial Court. Sensing the social and pecuniary opportunities that might accrue from a prolonged trip embracing the capitals and main cultural centres of Europe, Leopold obtained an extended leave of absence from his post as deputy Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. Throughout the subsequent tour, the children's Wunderkind status was confirmed as their precocious performances consistently amazed and gratified their audiences.
  The first stage of the tour's itinerary took the family, via Munich and Frankfurt, to Brussels and then on to Paris where they stayed for five months.
context_section_description: The journey's beginning, on 9 July 1763, was inauspicious; on the first day a carriage wheel broke, requiring a 24-hour pause while repairs were carried out. Leopold turned this delay to advantage by taking Wolfgang to the nearby church at Wasserburg, where according to Leopold the boy played on the organ pedalboard as if he had been studying it for months. In Munich, on successive evenings, the children played before Elector Maximilian III, earning from these engagements the equivalent of half of Leopold's annual salary of 354 gulden or florins. The next stop was Augsburg, where Leopold's estranged mother refused to attend any of the three concerts given there. The family then moved on to Schwetzingen and the Mannheim court, where the children's performance apparently amazed Elector Palatine Karl Theodor and his Electress.
  The next extended stop was at Mainz. The Elector was ill, but the Mozarts gave three concerts in the town, which brought in 200 gulden. From Mainz the family took the market boat up the River Main to Frankfurt, where several public concerts were given. Among those present at the first of these was the fourteen-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would many years later recall "the little fellow with his wig and his sword". An advertisement for these concerts announced that "the girl" would play "the most difficult pieces by the greatest masters", while "the boy" would play a concerto on the violin and also repeat his Vienna trick of playing with the keyboard completely covered by a cloth. Finally, "he will improvise out of his head, not only on the fortepiano but also on the organ...in all the keys, even the most difficult, that he may be asked".
  The family proceeded by riverboat to Koblenz, Bonn and Cologne. Turning west they reached Aachen, where a performance was given before Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, the sister of Frederick the Great. The princess tried to persuade Leopold to abandon his itinerary and go to Berlin, but Leopold resisted. "She has no money", he wrote to Hagenauer, recounting that she had repaid the performance with kisses. "Howbeit, neither mine host nor the postmaster are to be contented with kisses." They proceeded into the Austrian Netherlands, an area corresponding roughly to present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, where they arrived in the regional capital, Brussels, on 5 October. After several weeks' waiting for the governor-general, Prince Charles of Lorraine, to summon them ("His highness the prince does nothing but hunt, gobble and swill", wrote Leopold to Hagenauer), the Mozarts gave a grand concert in the prince's presence on 7 November. On the 15th the family departed for Paris.
  During the hiatus in Brussels, Wolfgang turned his attention briefly from performing to composing. On 14 October he finished an Allegro for harpsichord, which would later be incorporated into the C major sonata, K. 6, which he completed in Paris.
caption: W. A. Mozart in 1763, aged seven, at the start of the Grand Tour, wearing livery presented by the Empress Maria Theresa the previous winter
exif: {"Image Make": "HP", "Image Model": "HP pstc5200", "Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ReferenceBlackWhite": "[0, 255, 128, 255, 128, 255]", "Image ExifOffset": "198", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:08:10 19:16:25", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4315", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "5429", "EXIF Saturation": "Soft", "EXIF Sharpness": "Soft", "EXIF DeviceSettingDescription": "[1, 0, 19, 0, 32, 32, 32, 48, 65, 48, 32, 32, 32, 55, 65, 48, 32, 32, 32, 56, ... ]"}