Mozart's Pocket Watch

 

Mozart's Pocket Watch

 

Condensed from an article in the Sept./Oct. 1957 issue of Swiss Horological Journal.

 

By Bruce Shawkey

 

Somewhere in the world, treasured perhaps by a private collector among other rare timepieces, or possibly lying forgotten in some watchmaker’s shop, is a timepiece of great historical importance. It is, in fact, the pocket watch of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Empress Maria Teresa presented the watch to Mozart in 1771 as a gift for a serenade he was commissioned to write, "Ascanio in Alba," for the wedding of her son, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Mozart was 15 years old at the time.

It was a gold watch which had her enameled portrait on the back surrounded with a number of diamonds. The watch has a verge movement signed by the eminent French maker, Jean Antoine Lepine of Paris, who served as

watchmaker to Louis XV, Louis XVI and to Napoleon I. One can only the imagine the extravagence of such a gift. A watch in those times, especially one in a gold case, might cost a year's wages of a common laborer. Only royalty or the rich carried watches in those times. And we have to wonder what a boy of 15 would do with a pocket watch. It's been suggested that Mozart's father preserved the watch for him until 1786. That is the year that was engraved on the inside back of the watch along with the inscription “W.A. Mozart.”

By that time, Mozart was 30 years old, married with several children. Although he had achieved fame in musical circles, he was probably the only important musician of his time without a patron and a source of steady income. He had numerous debts, his wife was expecting another child, and to compound matters he had fallen into a period of loneliness and mental depression.

A short time after 1786 -- we don't know the exact date -- Mozart was forced to sell the watch to an acquaintance named Josef Strobl, a shopkeeper on the outskirts of Vienna.  The country shopkeeper treasured the timepiece during his lifetime.

As history records, Mozart died in 1791 at age 35. Meanwhile, Strobl’s will specified the watch be kept in the Strobl family. But in 1855, a grandchild sold the watch to Julius Hall of Stahlberg. A year later it was sold again, this time to an art dealer by the name of Josef Wagner. Two years later, in 1858, it was purchased from Wagner by Ignaz Pfeffer, wealthy owner of a bath house in Budapest, who added it to his collection of timepieces. It remained in Pfeffer's collection until his death in 1892. The watch was bequeathed to the "Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum" (Mozart Museum) in Salzburg. There, the watch resided safely for a number of decades, and presumably this is when the only known photograph of the watch was taken (left).

During World War II, the Mozart watch, together with other treasures of the Mozarteum, were crated and stored away for safekeeping from the Nazis. Safe though the crates were from bombings, they encountered other hazards. At some time during the summer of 1945, the boxes were broken into and several valuable items were pilfered, including the watch. Since its disappearance in '45, the watch has not resurfaced, and a treasured artifact of musical and horological history has disappeared. It remains the hope of the Mozarteum that some day someone will return the watch to the museum. The Mozart watch belongs not to the solitary collector, but the worlds of music and horology.