Franz Georg Kronauer's Album with the Autograph of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Object of the Week – one of the rarest facsimile editions connected with the Masonic life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his circle. It reproduces the celebrated Stammbuch (friendship album) of the Viennese Freemason Franz Georg Kronauer, a member of the lodge Zur neugekrönten Hoffnung ("New-Crowned Hope"), to which Mozart also belonged. The original album is preserved in the Austrian National Library.

The album is a unique collection of autographs by prominent figures of the Enlightenment. In addition to Mozart, it contains entries by the composer Joseph Martin Kraus; the writers Otto von Gemmingen, Aloys Blumauer, Johann Baptist Alxinger, and Gottlieb Leon; the celebrated actor of the Vienna Court Theatre Johann Heinrich Friedrich Müller; the violinist Joseph Zistler; and one of the leading figures of the European Enlightenment and Freemasonry, Ignaz von Born. The album is therefore not only a Mozart relic but also an important documentary source for the intellectual and Masonic circles of Vienna in the 1780s.

Around 1932, the Viennese publisher Max Jaffé produced a high-quality phototype facsimile edition in a limited run of approximately 200 copies, about 160 of which were distributed to Masonic lodges in the United States. Owing to its extremely small edition, the facsimile has itself become a bibliographical rarity. Surviving copies are known in the archives of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) and in the museum of the Grand Lodge of Sweden in Stockholm. The present copy was discovered in Australia.

The most celebrated page of the album is Mozart's entry, written on 30 March 1787. In the lower right corner of the page he wrote:

"Patience and tranquillity of mind contribute more to cure our distempers than the whole art of medicine."

The English maxim used by Mozart has been identified as a quotation from a popular eighteenth-century English schoolbook rather than an original composition. Beneath the quotation, Mozart signed his name and indicated his membership in the lodge Zur neugekrönten Hoffnung.