Mozart played the harpsichord, the clavichord, the fortepiano, the violin, the viola and the …organ? Indeed he did. Mozart, in fact, loved the organ. But much of his organ music was improvised every Sunday at Mass, and so it was never written down and thus didn’t survive.
Mozart spent his final few years in Salzburg as the court organist to the Archbishop Collorado, which meant that he was the organist at church every Sunday.
The Mozarts were devout Catholics and the church they attended was none other than the famous Salzburg Cathedral, or Salzburger Dom. The church was, and remains, the center of ecclesiastic life in Salzburg. It’s a beautiful, 17th-century, Baroque-style church with five organs.
In this episode of Mozart Snapshots, Katie Mahan takes us inside the Salzburger Dom and gives us an exclusive tour of the organ Mozart played every week with the current organist of the cathedral.
