More Than 200 Golden Mozart Statuettes Stolen From Salzburg Months After Famed Composer’s 270th Birthday
The Austrian public art installation heist is not the first time miniature statues of composers have been stolen
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Early last month, as part of a year-long celebration of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 270th birthday, his hometown of Salzburg, Austria, unveiled a sprawling public tribute to their beloved composer: 320 miniature golden statuettes featuring the musician and his favorite pup, Pimperl.
Mozart, with his reputation for rebellious flair and distaste for authority, may have gotten a chuckle out of what happened next. Within hours of the installation’s debut, at least two statuettes were stolen. This number grew to roughly 80 over the next several weeks. On Wednesday morning, officials announced that 210 statuettes were missing.
The installation, titled Mozart—The Untamable Genius, stretched across numerous locations in Salzburg, including the grounds of Mozart’s former residence, the Magic Flute Pavilion and within the greenery of the Mozarteum, the nearly 200-year-old home of Mozart’s library and archives.
Fun fact: Who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
- Born in Salzburg in 1756, Mozart showed an early talent for music and was performing before the royal courts of Europe before turning 6 years old
- Over the course of his career, he wrote more than 40 symphonies, 22 operas, 27 piano concertos and many other compositions.
- He died in 1791, at the age of 35, the same year when he composed some of his most famous pieces, including The Magic Flute.
“This offers a unique opportunity to inspire guests from all over the world beyond museum walls and to provide access to Mozart’s work on an entirely new level,” Linus Klumpner, managing director of the Mozarteum Foundation, says in a statement.
Most of the statues—each standing less than 20 inches tall and made of weather-resistant polymers—were placed in Mirabell Gardens, where the musician enjoyed taking his dog for long walks. “I didn’t want to do a monument of Mozart. There are already enough of these,” Ottmar Hörl, the German conceptual artist who created the artworks, told the Associated Press’ Philipp Jenne in July. “But I wanted to show his human side, that he was a normal human being despite his genius.”
“The worst thing for an artist is when his work dissolves,” says Hörl, according to Deutsche Welle’s Richard Connor. “This is organized theft. I find it a bit cheeky.”
Hörl went on to speculate that the thief or thieves likely carried out the heist under the cover of night, after the buildings had all closed. The artist has first-hand experience with such crimes—in 2023, his installation of 100 miniature Richard Wagner statuettes, placed in front of Germany’s Bayreuth Festival Theatre, also disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred reported at the time.
Each Mozart statuette is worth roughly $100, putting the value of the loss around $23,000. Hörl had planned to sell the figures after the exhibition, of which the outdoors portion is now closed. Roughly 110 statuettes remain on view, and 100 more sit in reserve—too few, organizers decided, to scale the exhibition back up. Compounding difficulties, and as was the case with the Wagner theft, is the fact that the factory which manufactures the statuettes is closed for summer break.
“That’s just the nature of public space,” Hörl tells dpa. “When you work as an artist in a public space, you mustn’t complain about what is happening there. It ranges from destruction to theft. That’s just how it is.”
Not all of Hörl’s many serial statuette installations have been affected by thefts. Exhibitions of 1,000 Caroline Mathildes, 250 Johann Wolfgang von Goethes and 100 Friedrich Schillers have gone on without a hitch.
Meanwhile, Salzburg will continue to honor Mozart, whose 270th birthday was celebrated on January 27. The annual Mozart Week, set to run next January 21 through 31 in Salzburg, will feature a new staging of the composer’s famed Così fan tutte opera.
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