Composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A child prodigy who mastered every form of his era before dying at 35.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was performing for European royalty as a young child and composing seriously before his teens, and by adulthood had written masterworks in essentially every genre the Classical era offered: symphony, concerto, string quartet, opera, and sacred choral music alike. Few composers in history have matched his combination of sheer fluency and consistency across so many different forms.
Life in brief
Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756. His father, Leopold, was a court violinist and a celebrated teacher, and he quickly realized what he had: Wolfgang was playing keyboard at three, composing at five, and performing for the Empress Maria Theresa at six. Leopold took Wolfgang and his gifted older sister, Nannerl, on years of tours across Europe - Munich, Paris, London, and Italy. Wolfgang wrote his first symphony at eight, and at fourteen, in Rome, he famously wrote out Gregorio Allegri's closely guarded Miserere from memory after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel.
Back home, he chafed in the service of Salzburg's archbishop, and in 1781 he quit - he was literally kicked out the door by the archbishop's steward - and settled in Vienna as a freelancer. There he married Constanze Weber, taught, gave concerts of his own piano concertos, and wrote his greatest operas, three of them with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Fame did not bring financial security, and his later years were dogged by money worries.
He died in December 1791, aged 35, while working on his Requiem. The cause is still debated, and the legend that his rival Antonio Salieri poisoned him - popularized by a Pushkin play and the film Amadeus - has no basis in fact.
Music and style
Mozart's music sounds effortless, and much of it was written quickly, but the ease is deceptive: beneath the elegant surface lies extraordinary craft, with every phrase perfectly balanced and nothing wasted. He had a dramatist's instinct for character, and even his instrumental music often feels like opera without words - themes that flirt, argue, and console.
His Symphony No. 40 is a compact demonstration of everything the Classical era's balance and clarity could achieve, its urgent opening theme built from remarkably economical means. His operas, especially The Magic Flute, blend comedy, spectacle, and genuine emotional depth in a way few of his contemporaries could manage.
Key works
- Operas - The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte (1790), and The Magic Flute (1791).
- Symphonies Nos. 40 and 41 - the last two of his symphonies, the 41st nicknamed "Jupiter," both written in the summer of 1788.
- Piano concertos - more than twenty, including No. 21 with its famous slow movement.
- Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1787) - the serenade everyone knows.
- Clarinet Concerto (1791) - one of the first great works for the instrument, written for his friend Anton Stadler.
- Requiem - his final work, the Requiem was left unfinished at his death and completed by a student, a fact that's fed centuries of romantic myth-making about his death, most of it more legend than fact.
Legacy
Mozart's music is often used as the clearest textbook example of Classical-era style precisely because he wrote so much of it, so well, in such a short life: his catalogue - more than 600 works, numbered in the "K." catalogue compiled by Ludwig von Köchel - functions almost as a survey of the entire era. Haydn called him the greatest composer he knew, Beethoven studied his scores, and his operas have never left the stage.
Where to start listening: Symphony No. 40's first movement is urgent and immediately gripping; "Queen of the Night" from The Magic Flute shows off the era's vocal fireworks. For pure charm, Eine kleine Nachtmusik is hard to beat.