Augsburg, Germany's City Of Mozart ~ Dates and Events

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's cousin, actually called Anna Maria Thekla, has become famous as his 'Baesle' (Swabian for cousin). She grew up in the street called Jesuitengasse, just behind the cathedral. There, her father, Franz Alois Mozart, owned a small publishing house, where he printed Catholic pieces of work. In addition, he worked as a caretaker at the Jesuit college of St. Salvator. At the age of 21, Mozart first met his then 19-year-old cousin. Right from the beginning their friendship was built on a common sense of humor. It is very likely that during the fun times they spent together they also discovered their love for one another. In October 1777 Mozart sent a letter to his father including a passage on his cousin: '. today, on October 17, early in the morning, I'm writing this letter and I am promising you that our cousin is beautiful, sensible, adorably practical and funny. We get on really well together. In addition, she is also a little misbehaved. We make fun of other people and find that very entertaining.' The two young people spent a lot of time together during the two weeks Mozart spent in Augsburg. Logically, they found it very sad when they had to say good-bye to each other on October 29. Anna Maria Thekla was especially very disappointed, because she had hoped for more to come of their meeting. However, only one day after he had left, Mozart sent her a letter, thus beginning an intense exchange of letters, which were sometimes extremely crude. Unfortunately, no letters of hers have survived, but one of Mozart's letters ends with the following sentence, "Now I wish you a good night, shit into bed until it breaks, sleep well and raise your ass towards your mouth. I will now go to the land where milk and honey flow and have a little sleep". It is of no surprise that, for a long time, some of those so-called 'Baesle'-letters had only been partly published. Mozart's son Carl Thomas even wanted to destroy them. The letter, which was supposedly the last one Mozart sent to his cousin, dates back to October 23, 1781.

With time, his cousin became less and less important to Mozart, one reason probably being his marriage with Konstanze Weber, whom he married on August 14, 1782 in Vienna. What did the cousin do? In 1784 she gave birth to a girl called Josepha without being married and in 1805 moved with her daughter and her son-in-law, a stage coach expeditor, into a house on Klinkertorstrasse. In 1812 she moved to Kaufbeuren and two years later settled in Bayreuth together with her family, where she died in 1841.