Ignatz Anton von Weiser

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Ignatz Anton von Weiser

Ignatz Anton von Weiser (born March 1, 1701 in Salzburg as Ignaz Anton Weiser; † December 26, 1785 ibid) was a well-known dramatist and an important dialect poet of the 18th century and mayor of the archbishopric city of Salzburg.

As a librettist , he provided the literary model for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's first commissioned work, Die Schuldigkeit des Erste Gebots, and was personally friends with the family, especially his father Leopold Mozart . His granddaughter was the well-known Prague pianist and singer Josephauchek , in whose villa Bertramka WA Mozart completed the opera Don Giovanni in 1787 .

Origin and family

The Salzburg Weiser family traced their origins back to Hans Weiser, a bourgeois wagon master at Isartor in Munich . His son Bartlmä (1636–1704) settled in the city of Salzburg after several years in Italy and Augsburg and on August 2, 1695, married Maria Anna Wagner, daughter of the Tittmoningen councilor and merchant Simon Wagner. Ignatz Anton Weiser comes from this connection. After the death of his father, his mother took the merchant Martin Schuster as her husband in a second marriage. In 1727 he acquired the Count's Kuenburg house on the market square, which later became the “Weiser House” (today the Salzburger Sparkasse).

Ignatz Weiser married Martha Theresia Brentano (1701–1764) from Augsburg in 1723 and fathered eleven children with her. The second-born daughter Maria Dominika Columba married the Prague pharmacist Anton Adalbert Hambacher on April 14, 1749 in the Salzburg Cathedral. This connection arose on March 7, 1753, when Josephauchek (née Hambacher) , who was later married to the Bohemian composer Franz Xaver Duschk and is famous in the German-speaking world as a pianist and singer.

The last son, (followed by another daughter) Franz Xaver Andreas Athanasius Weiser married Theresia Hafner (1740–1798) on May 25, 1762, daughter of the former mayor Sigmund Haffner the Elder. Ä. and sister of the well-known humanist Sigmund Haffner Edler von Imbachshausen, the namesake of Mozart's Haffner Symphony and the Haffner Serenade .

Life and work as mayor

Ignatz Anton Weiser came from a wealthy Salzburg-Bavarian merchant family and was raised to the nobility in 1747 by Prince Archbishop Jakob Ernst von Liechtenstein with the title of Weißer . He had been a member of the city ​​council since 1749 as the successor to Sigmund Haffner the Elder. Ä. from 1772 to 1775 the office of the mayor of Salzburg.

In this function, he was responsible for welcoming Prince Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo , newly elected in March 1772 , who came from Freysaal to Salzburg on April 29 of the same year . Mayor Weiser was waiting for the new sovereign together with the magistrate at the Kajetaner gate and handed him the city gate keys according to the old custom.

During the following years von Weiser got into a dispute with the Prince Archbishop due to the tight financial situation of the city on the one hand and the costs imposed by the sovereign for building measures ordered by him. In 1774, Weiser refused to pay the Prince Archbishop 1,400 guilders for the gatekeeper house in front of the Neutor . After the city had raised 54,000 guilders for the maintenance of the citizens' hospital and similar sums for the brother house and the pawnshop , the mayor was asked to save. When Weiser also refused to pay for the cost of the renovation of the old ballroom (on the site of today's Landestheater) and the town hall, as well as some adjoining rooms for the holding of balls from the city aerarium, Colloredo finally faced the choice asked to submit to his will or to resign from office.

Weiser decided in favor of the latter and on June 29, 1775, after almost three years in office, asked the magistrate to dismiss him from the office of mayor. Weiser's suspicions about the conversion of the ballroom into a theater were confirmed in retrospect when the conversion did not meet general expectations due to poor planning and execution.

Artistic creation and its meaning

The obligation of the first and most important commandment

Ignatz Anton von Weiser was the librettist of Mozart's spiritual Singspiel The Obligation of the First and führnemsten Gebottes KV 35, on Thursday, March 12, 1767 at 19:00 in the Knight's Hall of the archiepiscopal residence in Salzburg for the premiere arrived. The work was commissioned by the Archbishop of Salzburg, Sigismund von Schrattenbach , who wanted to convince himself of the abilities of the then eleven-year-old boy, who was praised as a child prodigy. Mozart offered his client a score with seven arias and a trio, the instrumentation of which already revealed his genius. However, the young Mozart only set the first part of Weiser's libretto to music; the compositions of the second and third parts, both of which were only performed a few days later and are no longer extant, came from Michael Haydn and Anton Cajetan Adlgasser .

The text of Weiser's work represents a parable with allegorical figures in a “graceful area by a garden and a small forest”. The powers of the world and those of eternity, the world and Christian spirit, strive for the soul of man. The Christian spirit emphatically describes the horrors of death and eternal damnation in order to induce people who have hitherto followed the world spirit and the joys of life to repent and give up their previous life. After mercy and justice leave people free to decide how they want to live, they finally move, guided by the world spirit, into a “free” world to fail there (second part) and return remorseful (third part).

Von Weiser highlighted his moral intention with a quote from the Revelation of John : “That there is no more dangerous state of mind than the lukewarmness in the business of salvation assures us the divine truth [...]: 'If God wanted you to be cold or warm: but because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor warm, I will begin to spit you out of my mouth. '”( Rev 3: 15–16  EU )

Other works

Ignatz Anton counted with his Singspiele, written in Salzburg dialect and performed in the court theater, above all Der Wachend-dreamende König Riepl (1749) and Die Geadelte Bauren or Alcinde, who was unknown to her (1750), both works with music by Johann Ernst Eberlin von Weiser, together with his fellow countryman and contemporary Florian Reichssiegel (1735–1793) from Salzburg, was one of the most important dialect poets of the 18th century. He had a major influence on the dialect comedies of the Lambach Benedictine composer Maurus Lindemayr , some of which were set to music by Michael Haydn, and which he met around 1750 in Salzburg.

His other works include the cantatas Christ buried (1741) and Christ condemned (1743), set to music by Leopold Mozart , three dramatic interludes in German for the Captivi von Plautus (1745) as well as other, less well-regarded intermediates that he created for the theater of the Benedictine University.

Relationship to the Mozart family

Ignatz von Weiser had been friends with Leopold Mozart since at least 1741. In the early 1840s, Mozart's father wrote the music for Weiser's famous cantatas Christ buried and Christ buried . In 1767, Mozart's son set the first part of the oratorio The Obligation of the First and Most Important Commandment to music and sculpted Weiser's work. Weiser in turn wrote an ode to the young Mozart in German in 1770 .

Weiser's granddaughter Josepha Duschk had known the Mozarts since she was a child and appeared in numerous performances of Mozart's works. She became a famous pianist and singer, who wrote WA Mozart, among other things, the Andromeda scene. In her Villa Bertramka , which she shared with her husband Franz Xaver Duschk, in what is now Prague's Smichov district, Mozart completed the opera Don Giovanni in 1787 , which had its first performance on October 29, 1787 in the Prague Estates Theater (Stavovské divadlo).

Death and testament

Crypt 22 ( Petersfriedhof Salzburg): Weiser's grave place, in which Ignatz Anton von Weiser is also buried

After his death, Ignatz von Weiser was buried in the Weiser crypt set up by his father Bartlmä on July 6, 1700 in the Petersfriedhof Salzburg . Leopold Mozart reported on this to his daughter Nannerl in St. Gilgen on December 29, 1785 : “After the health of old Mr. Bürgermstr had been declining for some time, his sand and stone pains increased, his feet swelled up and his breath became difficult, so he finally walked into eternity on the 26th evening around 8 o'clock. Just as this is writing, come from the funeral, which was full enough. He only arranged one service, which will be on Saturday, and 3 brotherhoods with the orphans were normal [note: accompaniment]. "

The fully preserved and provided with several supplementary pages Testament Weiser is now in the Salzburg provincial archive. The resulting insights into the family, financial circumstances and possessions of a fellow citizen of Mozart are unique, as no wills from this period have otherwise been preserved in Salzburg.

Sources and literature

predecessor Office successor
Sigmund Haffner (the elder) Mayor of Salzburg
1772 - 1775 		Johann Peter Metzger
personal data
SURNAME Weiser, Ignatz Anton von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weiser, Ignaz von; Weisser, Ignatz Anton von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian playwright and dialect poet; Mayor of Salzburg
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1701
PLACE OF BIRTH Salzburg
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1785
Place of death Salzburg