Duschek’s 1788 tour was a circular one: Prague → Dresden → Leipzig → Weimar → Karlsbad → Prague. It was also a leisurely one, as she remained for about a month in each of her main destinations. Her presence is recorded on the following dates: Dresden (18 March), Leipzig (22 April), Weimar (4 May) and Karlsbad (20 July). In 1789, she set out on a similar itinerary (Prague → Dresden → Leipzig) but with one striking difference: this year she met up with her long-standing friend Mozart, with whom she participated in at least two concerts. Whether this crossing of the ways was planned remains a moot point, which depends upon whether Mozart’s surprise at the meeting, expressed vividly in his letters to Constanze, was feigned or not. He reported just having missed her in Prague, but he caught up with her in Dresden. In informing his wife about the encounter, he went out of his way to stress that the meeting had been a happy accident, and it is this sense that he was overdoing its serendipitous nature that has raised suspicions which have proved hard to quell. Solomon propounded the theory that Mozart’s 1789 trip was in effect an elaborate deception and that his real motive for going was to prosecute an affair with Josepha, a damaging betrayal that he sought to conceal with a smokescreen of news about ‘accidental’ meetings with old friends. Brown pointed out that in questioning Mozart’s motives for delaying his trip to Berlin in order to deliver a letter to Duschek in Dresden, ‘Solomon takes into account neither eighteenth-century conventions of hospitality nor even the fact that Dresden is directly on the route between Prague and Berlin.’ He concludes that Mozart’s dealings with the Duscheks were ‘congenial and mutually supportive and hardly as secretive and fraught as Solomon suggests’. Nonetheless, his 1789 tour with its journeys back and forth between Dresden and Leipzig remains a puzzling episode in his career, and scholars are still coming up with new explanations.

Whether or not Mozart’s meeting with Duschek was planned, once the two had come together, concerts quickly followed. A joint performance was arranged at the Hotel de Pologne in Dresden. Although this was a well-established venue for benefits, Mozart described the occasion (on 13 April) as though it were a private concert party organised by and for a group of musical friends. He reported that Duschek had sung arias from Figaro and Don Giovanni, but these have yet to be identified. This academy was not reported in the Magazin der Sächsischen Geschichte, but that was probably because its coverage was focused instead on the much more newsworthy performance that Mozart gave the following day for the Elector of Saxony.