Inside Getreidegasse 9
Mozart's Birthplace: A Floor-by-Floor Tour
What's actually on display across the three floors of the house where Mozart was born, room by room — so you know exactly what you're looking at before you go.
See the guided Salzburg tour ↗Third floor: the apartment the Mozarts really lived in
The tour starts on the third floor, in the modest rented apartment Leopold Mozart took in 1747: a kitchen, a small storage room, a living room, a bedroom and a study. The kitchen sits apart from the living rooms, kept separate so its smoke and fire risk stayed away from the family's living space. A family tree in the hallway lays out the Mozart lineage, a blunt reminder of how many of Leopold and Anna Maria's seven children died in infancy. The storage room holds a genuinely moving artefact: Leopold's letter to his publisher announcing Wolfgang's birth on 27 January 1756. This is the room-by-room start of the museum's own route, not a reconstruction elsewhere in the building.
The bedroom and study: the violin and the most honest portrait
The bedroom holds personal effects — Mozart's ring, a tobacco tin, buttons, a wallet, even a lock of his hair — but the centrepiece is his childhood violin, made around 1746 by the Salzburg maker Andreas Ferdinand Mayr at roughly quarter-to-half size to fit a small child's hands. In the adjoining study, family portraits crowd the walls; look for the silverpoint drawing by Dorothea Stock, generally regarded as the most accurate likeness of Mozart because it wasn't flattered or idealised for a patron. It shows him at 33, about two and a half years before his death, plainly rendered rather than posed as a court composer — a useful corrective if the only Mozart image you know is the powdered-wig, cherubic-child cliché.
Third floor exhibition rooms: Vienna, decline and legacy
Beyond the family rooms, a further sequence of exhibition rooms covers Mozart's later, Vienna years. An anteroom sets the scene with a large panorama of 18th-century Vienna. The next room, on his life as a working composer, teacher and performer, includes a letter to his sister Nannerl describing a schedule so packed he often managed on five hours' sleep. A room on the aftermath of his death displays portraits of his two surviving sons and of Nannerl; a further room, on how his reputation was built after 1791, includes rare photographs of his widow Constanze and son Carl Thomas, plus material on the Mozarteum Foundation, founded in 1880.
Second floor: Mozart and the Theatre
The second floor turns to opera. Its centrepiece room holds the well-known unfinished 1789 portrait of Mozart at the piano, painted by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange — only the head, shoulders and hands are properly worked up, the rest of the canvas left bare, and 19th-century attempts to complete it were abandoned. In the same room sits an original instrument, Mozart's clavichord, on which he is understood to have composed parts of The Magic Flute. Around it are playbills from Mozart opera premieres and costume designs for The Magic Flute's first production, giving a concrete sense of how these works actually reached the stage rather than existing only as scores on a page.
Second floor continued: singers, sets and stagecraft
Further second-floor rooms move from the composer to the productions themselves. One room covers the singers who created his major roles and the audiences who received them, with portraits and models of early stage sets; a notable exhibit covers an 1816 Weimar staging of The Magic Flute with sets by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. A final theatre room draws on the Mozarteum Foundation's own stage-design collection to show how productions of Mozart's operas were staged from the 19th through the 21st century, mixing physical models with digitised sketches — useful if you've seen any of these operas performed and want the visual history behind the staging choices.
First floor: daily life, travel and the fortepiano
The first floor steps back from Mozart the composer to ordinary 18th-century domestic and travelling life. One room traces his years on the road with a wall map of his major destinations, his travelling tea caddy and sugar jar, and jewellery given to him as gifts along the way. A second room covers everyday life in Salzburg, from playing cards Leopold painted himself to a blood-letting scarificator, the era's routine medical tool. The route ends in a reconstructed middle-class living room built around period Hagenauer-family furnishings and a fortepiano made by Anton Walter around 1790 — the type of instrument Mozart himself favoured and played on in Vienna in the last decade of his life.