Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was born in Salzburg in Austria, the son of
Leopold, Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. By the age of three
he could play the piano, and he was composing by the time he was five; minuets
from this period show remarkable understanding of form. Mozart's elder sister
Maria Anna (best known as Nannerl) was also a gifted keyboard player, and in
1762 their father took the two prodigies on a short performing tour, of the
courts at Vienna and Munich. Encouraged by their reception, they embarked the
next year on a longer tour, including two weeks at Versailles, where the
children enchanted Louis XV. In 1764 they arrived in London. Here Mozart wrote
his first three symphonies, under the influence of Johann Christian Bach,
youngest son of Johann Sebastian, who lived in the city. After their return to
Salzburg there followed three trips to Italy between 1769 and 1773. In Rome
Mozart heard a performance of Allegri's Misere; the score of this work was
closely guarded, but Mozart managed to transcribe the music almost perfectly
from memory. On Mozart's first visit to Milan, his opera Mitridate, ré di Ponto
was successfully produced, followed on a subsequent visit by Lucia Silla. The
latter showed signs of the rich, full orchestration that characterizes his later
operas. A trip to Vienna in 1773 failed to produce the court appointment that
both Mozart and his father wished for him, but did introduce Mozart to the
influence of Haydn, whose Sturm und Drang string quartets (Opus 20) had recently
been published. The influence is clear in Mozart's six string quartets,
K168-173, and in his Symphony in G minor, K183. Another trip in search of
patronage ended less happily. Accompanied by his mother, Mozart left Salzburg in
1777, travelling through Mannheim to Paris. But in July 1778 his mother died.
Nor was the trip a professional success: no longer able to pass for a prodigy,
Mozart's reception there was muted and hopes of a job came nothing. Back in
Salzburg Mozart worked for two years as a church organist for the new
archbishop. His employer was less kindly disposed to the Mozart family than his
predecessor had been, but the composer nonetheless produced some of his earliest
masterpieces. The famous Sinfonia concertante for violin, violo and orchestra
was written in 1780, and the following year Mozart's first great stage work, the
opera Idomeneo, was produced in Munich, where Mozart also wrote his Serenade for
13 wind instruments, K361. On his return from Munich, however, the hostility
brewing between him and the archbishop came to a head, and Mozart resigned. On
delivering his resignation he was verbally abused and eventually, physically
ejected from the archbishop's residence. Without patronage, Mozart was forced to
confront the perils of a freelance existence. Initially his efforts met with
some success. He took up residence in Vienna and in 1782 his opera Die Entführung
aus dem Serail (The abdication from the Seraglio) was produced in the city and
rapturously received. The same year in Vienna's St Stephen's Cathedral Mozart
married Constanze Weber. Soon afterwards he initiated a series of subscription
concerts at which he performed his piano concertos and improvised at the
keyboard. Most of Mozart's great piano concertos were written for these
concerts, including those in C, K467, A, K488 and C minor, K491. In these
concertos Mozart brought to the genre a unity and diversity it had not had
before, combining bold symphonic richness with passages of subtle delicacy. In
1758 Mozart dedicated to Haydn the six string quartets that now bear Haydn's
name. Including in this group are the quartets known as the Hunt, which make use
of hunting calls, and the Dissonance, which opens with an eerie succession of
dissonant chords. Overwhelmed by their quality, Haydn confessed to Leopold
Mozart, 'Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the
greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.' The pieces are
matched in excellence in Mozart's chamber music output only by his String
Quintets, outstanding among which are those in C, K515, G minor, K516 and D,
K593. Also in 178 Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte collaborated on the first of a
series of operatic masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was
begun that year and performed in 1786 to an enthusiastic audience in Vienna and
even greater acclaim later in Prague. In 1787 Prague´s National Theatre saw the
premiere of Don Giovanni, a moralizing version of the Don Juan legend in which
the licentious nobleman receives his comeuppance and descends into the fiery
regions of hell. The third and last da Ponte opera was Cosí fan tutte (Women
are all the same), commissioned by Emperor Joseph II and produced at Vienna's
Burgtheater in 1790. Its cynical treatment of the theme of sexual infidelity may
have been responsible for its relative lack of success with the Viennese, who
responded with such enthusiasm to the comedy of Figaro. Mozart wrote two more
operas: the opera seria La clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Tito) and Die Zauberflöte
(The Magic Flute). The latter was commissioned by actor-manager Emanuel
Schikaneder to his own libretto. Its plot, a fairy tale combined with strong
Masonic elements (Mozart was a devoted Freemason), is bizarre, but drew from
Mozart some of his greatest music. When produced in 1791, two months before
Mozart's death, the opera survived an initially cool reception and gradually won
audiences over. The year 1788 saw the composition of Mozart's two finest
symphonies. Symphony No.40, in the tragic key of G minor, contrasts strikingly
with the affirmatory Symphony No.41 Jupiter. Neither helped alleviate his
financial plight, however, which after 1789 became critical. An extensive
concert tour of Europe failed to earn significant sums. A new emperor came to
the Austrian throne but Mozart was unsuccessful in his bid to become
Kapellmeister. He was deeply in debt when in July 1791 he received an anonymous
commission to write a Requiem. (The author of the commission was in fact Count
Franz von Walsegg, who wished to pass off the work as his own.) Mozart did not
live to finish the Requiem. He became ill in autumn 1791 and died on December 5;
his burial the next day was attended only by a gravedigger. Rumours that Mozart
had been poisoned abounded in Vienna after his death, many suggesting that rival
composer Antonio Salieri was responsible. Many now believe a heart weakened by
bouts of rheumatic fever caused his death. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in
Salzburg, Austria in January of 1756. By the age of four, he had exhibited such
extraordinary powers of musical memory and ear-sophistication that his father,
Leopold (a highly esteemed violinist and composer in his own right) decided to
sign young Wolfgang up for harpsichord lessons. At five, he was composing music;
at six, he was a keyboard virtuoso, so much so that Leopold took Wolfgang and
his sister Maria Anna on a performance tour of Munich and Vienna. From that time
on, young Mozart was constantly performing and writing music. Wherever he
appeared, people gaped in awe at his divine gifts. By his early teens, he had
mastered the piano,violin and harpsichord, and was writing keyboard pieces,
oratorios, symphonies and operas. His first major opera, Mitridate, was
performed in Milan in 1770 to such unqualified raves that critics compared him
to Handel. At fifteen, Mozart was installed as the concertmaster in the
orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Things did not go very well; Mozart
didn't get along with the Archbishop, and relations deteriorated to the point
where, in 1781, he quit this lofty position and headed for Vienna - quite
against his father's wishes. It has been told that Mozart once said, 'Since I
could not have one sister, I married the other.' Whether or not this quote is
true, the facts remain the same. Three and a half years after a young musician
named Aloysia Weber refused Mozart's marriage proposal, he married her younger
sister Constanze, on August 4, 1782. What sort of person was Constanze Weber?
Mozart, who nicknamed his bride Stanzerl, described her this way, 'She is not
ugly, but at the same time, far from beautiful. Her entire beauty consists of
two little black eyes and a nice figure. She isn't witty, but has enough common
sense to make her a good wife and mother .... She understands housekeeping and
has the kindest heart in the world. I love her and she loves me....' . Constanze
Mozart's life was far from easy. From June 1783 to July 1791, she bore six
children. The Mozarts' first child, Raimund Leopold, died at the age of two
months of an 'intestinal cramp' while his parents were away on a visit to
Salzburg. Their third, Johann Thomas Leopold, lived less than a month, their
fourth, Theresia, six months, and their fifth, Anna Maria, only one hour. The
Mozarts were left with only two surviving children, whom Wolfgang barely had
time to know. When he died, the eldest was seven years old, and the younger only
six months. After Mozart's death, Constanze met and evetually married Nikolaus
von Nissen, an official in the Danish Embassy, and it was he who raised Mozart's
sons. von Nissen died in 1826, and Constanze in 1842. The two boys led fairly
uneventful lives. The elder, Karl Thomas (b. 1784), ended up as a minor official
on the staff of the viceroy of Naples in Milan. He died in 1858. The younger,
Franz Xaver Wolfgang, inherited his father's musical inclinations, if not all of
his talent. He composed and conducted extensively throught Europe, but perhaps
the last word on this 'Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the Younger' was best spoken by
George Bernard Shaw in a letter he wrote in 1897. 'Do you remember the obscurity
of Mozart's son? An amiable man, a clever musician, an excellent player, but
hopelessly extinguished by his father's reputation. How could any man do what
was expected from Mozart's son? Not Mozart himself even.' Wolfgang and his
father, Leopold had never regained the closeness they had shared in earlier
days, but they reached a peace with each other, and maintained a steady
corresponence. Leopold died in Salzburg on May 28, 1787, at the age of 67.
Wolfgang had news of his father's illness in April, at which time Constanze was
ailing as well. This turn of events left him greatly depressed, and his own
health took a turn for the worse. His music from the preceding decade was only
sporadically popular, and he eventually fell back on his teaching jobs and on
the charity of friends to make ends meet. In 1788 he stopped performing in
public, preferring to compose. Mozart may have died of a number of illnesses.
The official diagnosis was miliary fever, but the truth is that the physicians
who attended him were never quite sure what Mozart died of. He suffered from
rheumatic pain, headaches, toothaches, skin eruptions, and lethargy. A common
theory today is that Mozart died of uremia following chronic kidney disease.
Another possibility is rheumatic fever. Regardless of the cause, Mozart became
bedridden for the last two weeks of his life. He died at shortly after midnight
on December 5th, 1791, aged thirty-five years, eleven months, and nine days.
Mozart's legacy is incestimalbe. A master of every form in which he worked, he
set standards of excellence that have inspired generations of composers. Some of
his representative works Symphonies Nos. 25, 29, 38, 39, 40 41 Jupiter Piano
Concertos Nos. 19, 20 & 27 sinfonia concertante for violin and viola String
Quartets: the Hunt, the Dissonance String Quintet No.4 in G minor, K516 Le Nozze
di Figaro