But of all these “Mossherts,” “Motards,” and the rest, only one, the mason apprentice David Motzert, born in the village of Pfersee, close to Augsburg, really belongs to our story. The _Augsburger Bürgerbuch_ of 1643 mentions him and sets his fortune at 100 florins. By his marriage with the _Jungfer_ Maria Negeler he was to become the great-great-grandfather of the creator of _Don Giovanni_. In the fullness of time David’s grandson, Johann Georg, abandoned the occupation of his forebears for that of a bookbinder. His second wife blessed him with two daughters and six sons. One of these sons, Franz Aloys, gained a kind of immortality as the father of Maria Anna Thekla, Wolfgang’s cousin, the “Bäsle,” to whom he wrote that series of notoriously smutty letters with which this lively young lady’s name is eternally linked.
Johann Georg’s first-born, Johann Georg Leopold, became for posterity simply Leopold Mozart, composer of arid music, author of a celebrated violin method, and father of Wolfgang and of Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, whom the world remembers almost solely as “Nannerl.” It is a Nannerl, incidentally, that we have to look for a sort of continuation of the Mozart line down almost to our own time. On January 9, 1919, there died in the Feldhof Insane Asylum, near Graz, the seventy-seven-year-old Bertha Forschter, a great-granddaughter of Nannerl, who had lived on in Salzburg til 1829, highly revered because of her exalted kinship.
What brought Leopold Mozart to Salzburg in the first place? A choirsinger in the Augsburg Church of St. Ulrich and a graduate of the Augsburger Jesuit Lyceum, he seemed to be shaping for a priestly career. He did not, at all events, follow the bookbinder’s trade like his brothers. Alfred Einstein finds it difficult to grasp why he should have preferred Salzburg to Munich or Ingolstadt for an orthodox theological education. Possibly a suggestion of the canons of St. Ulrich had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, he enrolled at the University in the town on the Salzach, July 22, 1738. There he studied philosophy, logic, and music, understood Latin, composed Passion cantatas and instrumental works, acquired some proficiency on the violin, and obtained a smattering of legal knowledge. Five years later he became fourth violinist in the court orchestra of the archbishop, but he maintained his close family connections with Augsburg and later encouraged his son not to relax these ties.