By Jane Glover [Playbill, 12 January 2008]
The year 1781 was hugely important for Mozart. After his triumph in Munich with Idomeneo, he was summoned to Vienna by his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, who was to spend several weeks in the Austrian capital and required some of his household musicians to attend him there. Mozart was suddenly relegated therefore from the position of an important guest composer-conductor in Bavaria to that of a mere servant (seated at meals “above the cooks but below the valets,” as he reported bitterly in a letter to his father); and as his movements were continually restricted, so his frustrations and anger increased. By June 1781 he had had enough.