Abstract

Constanze Mozart’s Activities as Trustee of the Estate in the Context of Memorial Cultures around 1800. After Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s death in 1791, Constanze Mozart established memorial practices to bring her husband’s name and his music into the musical canon. At first she organized concerts to promote his name and music. She continued by publishing his compositions with Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig and Johann Anton André between 1798 and 1802. Many years later, in 1828, she published a biography with her second husband, Georg Nikolaus Nissen. Her actions gained importance with the occurrence of bourgeois musical memorial cultures around 1800. These started to be organized around the musical estates of composers. Thus, the material quality of music became a dominant factor for organizing musical culture, and historiography as a whole within the nineteenth century. However, the activities of Constanze Mozart, as of other widows, have been marginalized. Memory is intertwined with gender constructions and processes of professionalization of musical historiography in the nineteenth century. The theoretical framework of memory research offers a vocabulary to analyze activities of widows in musical cultures and requires the deconstruction of the narrative of the “composer’s widow”. It also offers a way to highlight the importance of individual commitment for processes of cultural memory.