No brass instruments in Mozart's time had valves. Metal working techniques were just not yet good enough to make them. Tubas had not been invented.

Woodwinds in Mozart's time truly were all wood. Saxophones had not been invented. The contra-bassoon did not exist. There was no piccolo in Mozart's orchestra, nor a bass clarinet.

Percussionists today play all sorts of specialized instruments that did not exist in Mozart's time.

Electricity was not available in Mozart's time. There were no electronic keyboards, no electric guitars, no electronic devices of any kind.

In Mozart's day the Piano was quite a new invention. Mozart's piano had a much smaller range than the modern piano - at least an octave less on both the treble and bass ends. His piano also had only one string for each note, while our modern piano has three strings per note except at the bottom end, so a modern piano is much more powerful than Mozart's. Of course Mozart's beautiful piano concertos and piano sonatas do sound somewhat different on the pianos we have today. Do they sound better? Not everyone agrees on that.

Violin makers in the 18^th century the were already making instruments with the same shape and proportions of our modern violin. In fact many of the most prized violins in use by fine musicans today were made then. Herr Karl usually plays on a violin that was made in 1703, more than half a century before Mozart was born. Compositions like his Violin Concerto in G that we do in Wolferl would have sounded very much the same in his day.

The Harpsichord, not the piano, was the most common keyboard instrument in the Wolferl's world. On the outside Mozart's piano and Mozart's harpsichord looked quite similar. Inside, the harpsichord has a string for each note, just as Mozart's piano had. However the strings of the harpsichord are plucked by quills when you press the keys, rather than being struck by hammers as the strings are in a piano. Because of this different mechanism, the harpsichord player has very little control over how loud or soft the sound will be. That control is the great advantage of the piano.

A string instrument which is plucked with a pick. A mandolin has four pairs of strings, with each pair tuned the same as one of the four strings on a violin. The mandolin of Mozart's time had a very rounded back.

When Mozart called for the Horn in his scores, he expected an instrument which today we call the "natural horn". This instrument is similar in shape to the French Horn, but it has no valves. As you can imagine, it's really difficult to play on the natural horn a composition such as the Horn Concerto we do in Wolferl.

In the late 18^th century flutes were wooden, unlike the modern metal flute. Their sound is somewhat softer and sweeter than the modern flute. The modern flute also has many additional keys, making it much easier to play certain fast passages and trills.

The glockenspiel has a metal bar for each note, which the player strikes with a mallot, essentially a small hammer. This instrument is often found today in marching bands. Just between us, in Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" Papageno carries a "magic" glockenspiel but he doesn't actually play it. He just pretends to play the glockenspiel while someone off-stage plays the music on a celesta, which is an instrument that also has metal bar for each note, but the celesta has a keyboard, so you can play chords and fast passages on it much more easily.

The clarinet has developed and improved a lot since Mozart's day. The clarinet that Anton Stadler would have used for the first performance of Mozart's beautiful clarinet concerto might not have had more than five keys.