Leopold Mozart's death in May 1787 in effect deprived us of the details or at least the face-saving rationales of Mozart's faltering career in the late 1780s, the most problematic period of his years in Vienna. Without that correspondence, biographers have been forced to interpret relatively scanty evidence, leading to such theories as Hildesheimer's on Mozart's abandonment by the aristocracy after his operas about wicked aristocrats, or the more sober financial interpretations of Braunbehrens and the cultural reading of Steptoe. Thus, contradictory and fragmentary evidence makes assessing the state of Mozart's career in 1788 somewhat problematic; on the whole, it seems to have been the first of three increasingly difficult and frustrating years, before his career was finally reinvigorated in 1791.

The state of Mozart's career in 1788

On the positive side, Mozart had just been made “k. k. Kammer-Kompositeur” at an annual salary of 800 gulden (7 December 1787), and the Viennese premiere of Don Giovanni on 7 May 1788 netted him 225 gulden from the Emperor. He led gala performances of C. P. E. Bach's oratorio Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Christi, organized by Baron van Swieten, on 26 February and 4 March, with an “orchestra of eighty-six persons” at the homes of the nobility, and on 7 March at the Burgtheater. At one of these concerts he may even have played his Piano Concerto, K. 537 (“Coronation”), as an entr'acte.