Comedy "Der Salzburger Lump in Wien" (K. 509b)
de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Der Salzburger Lump in Wien (K. 509b) is not an opera in the usual sense but an unfinished comic sketch—primarily a draft of spoken theatre—associated with Vienna in 1787, when the composer was 31. What survives points to Mozart’s private, satirical theatrical instinct at a moment when his stage imagination was otherwise concentrated on Don Giovanni and its Viennese afterlife.
Background and Context
In mid-1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was living and working in Vienna, moving between public composition and a more intimate, improvisatory world of jokes, canons, and theatrical sketches. Within this sphere belongs the fragment titled Der Salzburger Lump in Wien (“The Salzburg rascal in Vienna”), transmitted in sources as a comic Lustspiel draft rather than a performed, published stage work.[1]
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Several later writers connect the sketch with Mozart’s circle around the pupil Franz Jakob Freystädtler, who appears to have been satirized in Mozart’s occasional pieces under nicknames (including “Stachelschwein”).[2] The tone suggested by this context is consistent with Mozart’s Viennese habit of mixing musical and theatrical wit—though Der Salzburger Lump in Wien itself should be approached as a personal draft, not a documented theatrical commission.
What Survives
What is securely attested today is a literary (spoken-theatre) sketch associated with the Köchel entry K. 509b, rather than a set of extant, performable incidental numbers. The Digital Mozart Edition’s critical material for the Songs, Partsongs, Canons volume explicitly discusses “this sketch KV 509b” and treats it as a textual entity that can be quoted in full elsewhere, implying that the surviving material is not a conventional score with defined instrumentation or movements.[3]
Because no stable musical text (with notated vocal lines, instrumental parts, or a coherent sequence of numbers) is reliably transmitted under this title in commonly consulted reference channels, it is not possible to describe the work’s instrumentation, movement plan, or musical style in the way one would for Mozart’s authenticated stage scores.
Scholarly Context
In reference literature the item is generally characterized as an unfinished burlesque/comic dramatic draft, placed in Vienna around 1787.[1][2] A dedicated study by Heinz Wolfgang Hamann (published in Acta Musicologica) focuses on Mozart’s “dramatic draft” (dramatischer Entwurf) of Der Salzburger Lump in Wien, reinforcing the view that the primary object is a theatrical-text conception rather than a finished musical work.[4]
Placed against Mozart’s documented Viennese output of 1787, the fragment’s chief interest lies less in compositional technique than in the continuity of his comic theatre imagination: alongside major collaborative stage projects, Mozart also experimented—privately and fragmentarily—with vernacular satire and character sketching that could, in principle, have invited incidental musical insertions, even if such music does not securely survive under this title.
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[1] Köchel catalogue entry listing K. 509b as Comedy "Der Salzburger Lump in Wien" (July 1787? Vienna).
[2] K. Steyaert & K. Sprague, "Riddles and Counterpoint: Mozart’s Pupil Franz Jacob Freystädtler" (PDF), mentioning *Der Salzburger Lump in Wien*, K. 509b, as an unfinished burlesque piece tied to Freystädtler.
[3] Neue Mozart-Ausgabe / Digital Mozart Edition critical material (English) for *Songs, Partsongs, Canons* (PDF), referencing “this sketch KV 509b.”
[4] Heinz Wolfgang Hamann, "Mozarts dramatischer Entwurf 'Der Salzburger Lump in Wien'" (Acta Musicologica), via JSTOR record page.