The church on this square stands out for what it lacks, because its tower has no spire but a flat top, cut short by cannon fire and never rebuilt.
This is Vienna's Italian national church, and that tells you something about how music worked in this city. If you wanted to build a career in the eighteenth century, speaking Italian helped, because the opera, the court chapel and the taste of the court were all Italian, and it was around this church that the community gathered: musicians, librettists, singers and their families.
The most powerful of them was , who spent forty years as court music director and so decided what was heard at court. The idea that he poisoned Mozart is a story that only surfaced after his death, fuelled by a play by and later by a film.
What rarely gets told is that for years he taught young musicians who had no money, free of charge, among them Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. The man who became a murderer in people's imagination actually trained a good part of the next generation.
We follow the church towards the , the triangular square a little further on.
Sources. Story: Wien Geschichte Wiki, Stadt Wien; Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Music Collection
