🇦🇹 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Biography

In 1761, a five-year-old boy in Salzburg composed his first piece of music. His father, Leopold Mozart, a court musician and deputy Kapellmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg, wrote it down because the child could not yet reliably manage the notation himself. The piece, a minuet in G major — simple, structurally conventional, unremarkable by adult standards — was nevertheless the work of a child who had been listening to music being taught in the same room for two years and had absorbed, without instruction, the fundamentals of harmonic structure, melodic phrasing, and formal proportion. Leopold recognized what he had. He began planning the tours almost immediately.

Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, then the seat of the Archbishopric of Salzburg in the Holy Roman Empire, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart. Five of the seven children did not survive infancy. Wolfgang and his sister Maria Anna, four years older, known as Nannerl, were the survivors. Nannerl was herself a gifted musician, and it was watching his father teach her that had given the infant Wolfgang his musical education. He began picking out intervals on the harpsichord before he was three. By four he was playing short pieces. By five he was composing them.

The grand tour of Europe that Leopold organized between 1763 and 1766 — the children were seven and eleven when it began — covered Munich, Augsburg, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, Amsterdam, and dozens of cities in between. Everywhere they played for aristocracy and royalty: the Elector of Bavaria, Louis XV and Marie Lesa at Versailles, King George III and Queen Charlotte in London, stadholders in the Netherlands. The performances were demonstrations of a kind of musicianship that seemed to violate the ordinary relationship between age and skill. Wolfgang improvised. He played works he had never seen, at sight, with technical accuracy. He played with a cloth covering the keyboard. He identified notes struck simultaneously by different instruments. Leopold's instinct was correct: this was a marketable phenomenon, and the tour was conducted with commercial as much as artistic purpose.

By the time the tour ended, Wolfgang had written his first symphony — Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16 — during the London visit, when he was eight. He had also written his first keyboard concerto and a substantial body of keyboard pieces. The quality was uneven: some of these early works are elegant and accomplished, others merely competent. But the fact of their existence — a child producing symphonic work before his ninth birthday — was without precedent in the documented history of Western music.

The mature career, from his late teens through his death at thirty-five, produced the body of work on which his permanent reputation rests. The operas — Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte (1790), Die Zauberflöte (1791) — are the four corners of the operatic canon, works performed continuously across two and a half centuries without interruption. The symphonies, particularly the final three — No. 39, 40, and 41 (Jupiter) — composed in an extraordinary six-week burst in the summer of 1788, represent the summit of the Classical symphonic form. The piano concertos, particularly Nos. 20 through 27, are the most significant body of work in that genre before Beethoven. The chamber music, the choral works, the serenades — each category contains pieces that have never been surpassed within it.

He died December 5, 1791, at the age of thirty-five, of an illness that has never been definitively identified. He had been composing the Requiem in D minor, K. 626, on commission, and left it unfinished. His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it from Mozart's sketches. The circumstances of his death — the unfinished Requiem, the contested cause, the burial in an unmarked common grave — have attracted centuries of myth and speculation that the historical record does not adequately support. What the record does support is this: in thirty-five years of life, he composed over 626 catalogued works. No composer before or since has matched the combination of quantity, breadth, and sustained quality that his output represents.

Timeline

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