Three Documents from the Mozarts’ first Italian tour

The first letter from Giammaria Ortes to Johann Adolph Hasse that mentions the Mozarts. Not in Dokumente.

Dexter Edge and Christopher J. Salmon discuss the newly discovered letter from Count Carlo Firmian in Milan to Count Giacomo Marulli in Bologna. The letter is Firmian’s response to Marulii’s (lost) answer to Firmian’s (lost) letter of recommendation for the Mozarts. Marulli is mentioned in Leopold Mozart’s travel notes, but up to now has remained entirely unknown to Mozart scholars.

The version in Dokumente of Ortes’s letter to Hasse of 2 Mar 1771 omits three relevant sentences at the beginning of the paragraph, and two at the end that also refer to the Mozarts. We give the complete corrected text of the passage from Livia Pancino’s scholarly edition (1998) of the complete Ortes-Hasse correspondence. The last two sentences contrast the reception in Venice of the Mozarts and the Davies sisters: Marianne, the glass-harmonica virtuosa, and her sister Cecilia, a young singer trained by Hasse. Mozart scholars have remained largely unaware that the Davies sisters were in Venice at the same time as the Mozarts. The commentary by Dexter Edge revisits the careers of Marianne and Cecilia, correcting some widespread errors in the secondary and reference literature.