500 Schilling Don Giovanni

This issue commemorates the 1787 world premiere of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which took place in Prague — not Vienna, a fact that irritated the Viennese court considerably. Joseph II reportedly remarked that the opera was "not meat for the teeth of my Viennese," though Mozart himself considered it his finest work. Austria's long campaign to claim Mozart as a national symbol reached something of a peak in the early 1990s with a sustained bullion and commemorative program of which this coin formed a part.