Mozart preferred his coffee black: About two months before he died, Mozart wrote to his wife about playing billiards after which he ordered black coffee and smoked a "wonderful pipe of tobacco". Coffee even makes an appearance in Don Giovanni.Rossini noticed that coffee's effects wore off after constant use: A lover of many foods, he was quoted as saying, "Coffee is a matter of fifteen or twenty days: luckily the time to make an opera".When in Venice, Wagner would drop... more

Over time, a special coffee house culture developed in Habsburg Vienna. On the one hand, writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals, bon vivants and their financiers met in the coffee house, and on the other hand, new coffee varieties were always served. In the coffee house, people played cards or chess, worked, read, thought, composed, discussed, argued, observed and just chatted. A lot of information was also obtained in the coffee house because local and foreign newspapers were freely... more

December 1792: Right after arriving in Vienna, Beethoven prepared a shopping list. Items and costs on the list are “wig-maker, coffee, overcoat, boots, shoes, pianoforte-desk, seal, writing-desk, pianoforte-money.”In Beethoven’s time Vienna still had a rigid class-based society each having its own brothels, restaurants and coffee houses (cafés), but Beethoven, as a commoner and darling of aristocrats, had access to all kinds. Housing was not the brightest feature of... more