Mozart No Pauper, N.Y. Economists Say : Music: Researchers conclude that the 18th-Century composer’s postulated income put him in Vienna’s upper-middle class, ‘Amadeus’ notwithstanding.

Who can think about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart without a pang of pity? The unrewarded genius, so conventional wisdom says, eked out a paltry existence during his much-too-short life and then died a pauper with an unceremonious burial. His body wasn’t even put in a coffin.

But pity no more.

All that pauper stuff is folly, say William Baumol, an economist at New York University, and Hilda Baumol, a New York economics consultant. In a paper that grew out of last year’s Mozart Bicentennial Symposium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, the husband-and-wife economists concluded that Mozart was thoroughly middle-class by the standards of his day, left a rather affluent estate to his widow and was buried with precisely the pomp and circumstance as the rest of Vienna’s bourgeois.

The economists calculated that Mozart’s income in the last decade of his life from 1781-91 put him in a class along with Vienna’s upper-middle class at a time when the average wage earner made starvation wages and owned very few material goods.

However, the Baumols were not particularly interested in Mozart’s finances.

In fact, their research, which will be published by the Woodrow Wilson center in December, focused on explaining the extraordinary confluence of composers such as Haydn, Dittersdorf, Salieri, Schubert, Beethoven, Gluck and Mozart during the golden era of composers in German-speaking Europe.

That concentration in late 18th- and early 19th-Century Europe, the economists concluded, occurred because of the fragmentation of Central European states into about 1,800 royal courts with employment opportunities for musicians. Additionally, changes in technology of music such as the invention of the fortepiano, an instrument subtler than a harpsichord but louder than a clavichord, made the new “galant” style of popular music easier to play at concerts for large, paying audiences.

But what the Baumols found out about Mozart’s finances proved to be the most intriguing part of their research and in direct contradiction to Hollywood lore and accepted history, although a growing number of revisionist scholars and historians have written that he was better off than previously believed.

The greatest propagator of the poverty misconception is the 1984 Oscar-winning movie “Amadeus,” adapted from Peter Shaffer’s play of the same title, both of which never claimed to be biographically correct. Some earlier biographies and most reference books state that Mozart lived a hand-to-mouth existence, but those sources leave out the “imponderable” undocumented portion of Mozart’s income, say the Baumols.

The economists used a conservative 1989 graph of Mozart’s income by Julia Moore, an economist and musicologist who has done some of the latest and most respected studies of late 18th-Century composers’ income. They then took Mozart’s average known income as documented by Moore and added in what they speculate he earned for the operas, performances and commissions for which payment was never documented, but services were rendered. For instance, there is no record of payment for Mozart’s opera “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” so it has been treated in the past as zero payment.

Their “conservative calculations” conclude that Mozart’s annual income was between 1,900 and 2,500 florins during his decade in Vienna. Translated into 1989 U.S. dollars, the Baumols figure that Mozart’s wage equivalent of that income would be roughly $175,000 a year, about the maximum earnings of a studio musician today. Hardly abject poverty by any means, but not the income of Andrew Lloyd Webber, either.

But such translations are made more difficult because data on 18th-Century prices and consumption habits are sparse. Not only that, standards of living in the 18th Century were one-seventh that of today’s. The Baumols deal with this disparity by using what they call a “hierarchy of earnings in Mozart’s time and present.” Mozart’s income was more than four times the 600 florins earned by the top paid high school teacher at that time. To find out the equivalent of Mozart’s earnings today, the Baumols take the top salary of a New York high school teacher, about $50,000, multiply it by four and conjecture that his income would be about $200,000 a year.

It is clear that Mozart was living well above average, say the Baumols, who go on to compare Mozart’s income to the middle-class income of a Viennese bachelor using “Sketchbook of Vienna,” a chronicle of daily life in late 18th-Century Vienna written by Johann Pezzl, a contemporary of Mozart. Pezzl observed that 550 florins a year kept a “respectable middle-class bachelor” very comfortable.

No one--including the Baumols--disputes that Mozart suffered dire straits during the Turkish War in 1789-90. Vienna was preoccupied by the conflagration, the economy was inflated and many of Mozart’s patrons were serving in the military. Even the emperor was at war in 1788. Constanze, who had endured six pregnancies in 10 years, had illnesses on and off for years that had taken a financial toll on their income. Then in 1791, the year of Mozart’s death, Prince Karl Lichnowsky filed a lawsuit against Mozart that resulted in a considerable judgment against him. Nevertheless, the Mozarts continued to live in the style to which they were accustomed, the Baumols concede, borrowing money occasionally.

But perhaps there is no better evidence of Mozart’s affluent lifestyle than the estate he left. During that year, Mozart recorded earning 1,925 florins with outstanding debts of 918 florins, biographer Robbins Landon writes. The highest bill was owed to the tailor, not surprising when you consider the vast wardrobe of natty fashions kept by Mozart. The estate contained many of his suits, pairs of shoes, boots, stockings, jackets, frock coats and scarves along with four couches (Beethoven’s estate had one), 18 upholstered chairs matching the couches, 63 porcelain pieces, seven wood tables, two chests of drawers, two bookcases, a billiard table, a fortepiano, a viola, a desk, a chandelier, five candlesticks, a clock, a gilt mirror, along with numerous other items. Landon writes that the estate was deliberately undervalued at only 592 florins to help the widow avoid higher probate duties.

And although Constanze was portrayed in “Amadeus” as a bumbling airhead who mismanaged Mozart’s house finances, the Baumols say that is folly. On the contrary, she handled the estate opportunistically by destroying documents and letters, thereby minimizing its value.

Finally, what could possibly explain the grim burial? The Baumols discovered that indeed, there was nothing unusual about Mozart’s burial, as is noted by historians and biographers of that period. The genius composer was buried in the same manner as the bourgeois, according to burial laws of the day.

Emperor Joseph II of Austria, for reasons of hygiene and economy, decreed that all bodies be sewn into a linen sack and carried in a reusable wooden box to a mass grave outside the city walls for burial. Mozart and most of the Viennese were buried this way after receiving a proper church funeral. Only the nobility escaped having their bodies dumped en masse without grave markers.

In a letter to his father from Vienna in 1781, Mozart wrote: “Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible, for after good health, it is the best thing to have.”

Mozart: How High His Earnings?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s annual income, according to known records, was solidly middle-class. But new research indicates his earnings were probably about a third higher because no record of payment has been found for many of his operas, performances and other commissions.

Mozart’s probable average income: $175,000

Mozart’s average known income: $125,000

Average income of a middle-class bachelor: $25,000 -- 50,000

Source: Julia Moore, economist and musicologist, 1989

Note: Income figures adjusted from florins to present-day dollars.