International Mozarteum Foundation

Ownership is the unusual part. The Mozarteum Foundation holds the house in the Getreidegasse where Mozart was born and the Dancing Master's House on the Makartplatz where the family later lived; in the Bibliotheca Mozartiana it keeps some 35,000 titles, around 190 letters in Mozart's hand, 370 in his father's, and more than a hundred musical manuscripts — the deepest single accumulation of Mozartiana anywhere. The institution grew out of commemorations begun in 1841, was constituted in 1880 and reorganised as an association in 1925. Its concert building on the Schwarzstraße, designed by Richard Berndl and completed in 1914, contains the Great Hall and the Viennese Hall, in use from October to June. Since 1956, the bicentenary year, the Foundation has also mounted Mozart Week each January around the composer's birthday, bringing orchestras, chamber players and singers to Salzburg in its coldest weeks — a season in which textual scholarship and performance are set deliberately against each other.