František Xaver Dušek

František Xaver Dušek ( or Dussek); 8 December 1731 – 12 February 1799) was a Czech composer and musician. He was one of the most important harpsichordists and pianists of his time. Biography Dušek was born in Chotěborky in the Kingdom of Bohemia (today part of Vilantice, Czech Republic). He was taught the harpsichord in Vienna by Georg Christoph Wagenseil and established himself around 1770 in Prague as a successful keyboard teacher. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was probably his guest in his Bertramka villa in Košíře, just outside Prague, although no documentation exists to support claims originating in nineteenth-century literature that he stayed there frequently. Mozart himself never reported staying there and no contemporary witness ever reported seeing him there. The best evidence that he ever stayed there comes from a reminiscence of Mozart’s son Karl Thomas Mozart that dates from 1856 and indicates that he was at the Bertramka during his second visit to Prague (during October and November 1787). Karl Thomas was not himself a witness to the incident reported, rather he only heard about it from friends of Mozart whom he met as a child in Prague during the 1790s. Furthermore, there