Mozart’s Last Letter to His Father: Esotericism and Mysticism in Late Eighteenth-Century Viennese Society

Abstract

In what turned out to be his last letter to his ailing father, dated April 4, 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sought to console Leopold (and himself) with musings about the immortality of the soul. While scholarly commentators have regarded it as possible that the letter’s text alludes to the son’s and father’s shared experiences of Freemasonry, they have disagreed about whether sufficient evidence exists to reach such a conclusion firmly. However, the holograph of the letter became publicly available for the first time in November of 2020, and furnishes the opportunity to revisit the matter. Examination of this original document reveals that Mozart drew an esoteric figure of two interlocking triangles next to his signature. The symbolic meanings of this figure and their relationship to the content of letter can be illuminated through consideration of two speeches delivered by Mozart’s friend and patron, Count Franz Joseph Anton von Thun-Hohenstein, at the Masonic lodge Zur wahren Eintracht (True Concord) in 1783 and 1784. In these addresses, the count, a member of several secret societies, including the Asiatische Brüder (Order of the Asian Brethren), invoked the same figure of two interlocking triangles as an esoteric, mystical symbol of transcendence and reconciliation.