The Mozart Cache
by
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The bulk of what is termed “Mozart study” is devoted to an examination of his music and life.
Non-musical subjects that have a Mozartean facet, such as portraiture and relics, don’t occupy
much space in the Mozart literature. This is not a criticism but rather an observation about the
division of labor. Considering the subject, one could hardly expect the situation to be different.
Mozart portraiture is not under the same kind of continuous investigation as are his music and
life. In the current world of Mozart iconography, the knowledge of who painted what, and which
paintings are authentic is in an untidy state, not having had significant improvements since the
death in 1967 of the then leading Mozart iconographer, Otto Erich Deutsch. While there are
books dealing with Mozart portraiture, the newest and most comprehensive is almost 50 years
old.1 And though the age of digital technology is very much out of its infancy, the tools used to
assess both portrait authenticity and sitter identification are still heavily dependent on subjective
opinion and connoisseurship, two tools that now carry a less significant role in Mozart scholarship
than during the heydays of Georges de Saint-Foix and Alfred Einstein.
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About the Book
This book is a detailed critical inspection of a collection of objects that have their feet in two
worlds, namely Mozart Historical Research and Art Historical Study. Leopold Mozart, the
father of one of the world’s most supreme composers, died in 1787. At the time of his death, his
apartment held precious treasures given to his brilliant son and daughter during their lengthy
European tour of 1763-1766. Furthermore, it is likely that memorabilia and portraits collected in
the 21 years following that tour were also in Leopold’s apartment. There is little historical record
about what his collection might have contained at the time of his death, or what happened to it.
In 2003, an American antiques collector, traveling in Italy, bought what he thought were some
interesting pieces from a woman merchant. Though he was unaware of what he had stumbled
into at that time, these pieces now appear to have been a portion of Leopold Mozart’s estate. The
collection’s owner engaged the author of this book to examine and comment on the approximately
40 pieces in the acquisition. The telling of the story of each of the collection’s pieces and how they
survived for more than two centuries is rich with Mozart history.
About the Author
Daniel N. Leeson’s undergraduate and graduate degrees are all in mathematics. Following service in the US Army during the Korean War, he began his career in 1958 as a mathematician, businessman, technician, salesman, systems engineer, and both a scientific and commercial programmer for The International Business Machines Corporation. Following his retirement from IBM after almost 30 years of service, he then taught mathematics at De Anza College in
The Story of the Mozart Requiem (Algora Press, 2006), a novel entitled, The Mozart Forgeries,
(iUniverse, 2006), and co-author for one of the earliest texts on computer programming,
Basic Programming Concepts (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1962). For ten years he was an officer and treasurer of the Mozart Society of America. In both 1992 and 1993, he was a faculty member of the Mozart Opera Studies Institute sponsored by
For his writings he was awarded the 1992 Artist Fellowship for Writers of Creative Nonfiction by the California Arts Council. He is married to the former Rosanne Dryfuss of