Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: the prodigy who wrote like breathing

By the Magna Bureau Encyclopedia Desk

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote more than six hundred works in a life of thirty-five years: forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, five violin concertos, twenty-two operas and a body of chamber music, church music and songs that musicians still treat as the measure of the art. He was a child prodigy who toured the courts of Europe at six, a court employee who quarrelled with his archbishop, and a freelance composer in Vienna who died in debt and was buried in a common grave. His music combines a child's ease with an adult's depth, and three centuries later it still sounds as if it had never been composed at all, only found.

Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who called himself Wolfgang Amadeus, was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756, the seventh child of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl. Only two of the seven children survived infancy: Maria Anna, called Nannerl, and Wolfgang. Leopold was a violinist and composer in the service of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and he was also a shrewd teacher and manager. He noticed that his son could pick out chords at three, play short pieces at four and compose at five. By six the boy was performing before the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, and the story, probably true, that he slid down the imperial banisters has entered legend along with the music.

Leopold turned the family into a touring company. Between 1762 and 1773 the Mozarts travelled through Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, with the children performing for kings, queens and anyone who would pay. In London the eight-year-old Wolfgang wrote his first symphony. In Italy, at fourteen, he heard Allegri's Miserere once in the Sistine Chapel and wrote it out from memory, a feat that astonished Rome and earned him a papal knighthood. In Bologna he passed the entrance examination of the Accademia Filarmonica, a test of counterpoint that grown composers failed. The tours made Mozart the most famous child in Europe, but they also made him a child who had spent his formative years in carriages, antechambers and sickbeds, performing on demand.

Salzburg, however, was a small, clerical city, and its archbishop, Hieronymus Colloredo, who took office in 1772, was a reforming, cost-cutting ruler with little patience for a brilliant, restless employee. Mozart served as a court organist and concertmaster, composing masses, serenades and divertimenti for the court's needs, including the Haffner and Posthorn serenades written for Salzburg families. He chafed at the low pay, at being seated with the servants at table, and at the Archbishop's refusal to let him travel. The tension would end in one of the most famous ruptures in musical history.

In 1777 Mozart left Salzburg for Paris with his mother, hoping for a post. The journey was a disaster: his mother died in Paris in July 1778, the French court offered him little, and he returned to Salzburg to a humiliating welcome. In 1781 he travelled with the Archbishop to Vienna, where Colloredo treated him, in Mozart's own bitter words, as a lackey. When Mozart asked to leave, the Archbishop's steward, Count Arco, literally kicked him out of the room. Mozart wrote home that he was happy to be free: he would live in Vienna as a freelance musician, giving lessons, publishing music and writing operas on commission. No composer of his standing had ever tried to live that way before.

Vienna in 1781 was the largest German-speaking city in Europe, with an emperor, Joseph II, who loved opera and played the keyboard, and a public hungry for concerts. Mozart married Constanze Weber in 1782, against his father's wishes, and settled into a life that mixed triumph and worry. The opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), premiered in 1782, was a popular success, and the Emperor is said to have complained that it had too many notes, to which Mozart replied that it had exactly as many as necessary. The piano concertos of 1784 to 1786, written for his own subscription concerts, are the core of his orchestral achievement: works in which the piano converses with the orchestra as an equal, by turns brilliant, tender and tragic.

Freelance life was precarious. Mozart earned well in good years, from teaching, publishing, concerts and opera commissions, but he spent freely, kept servants, dressed elegantly and borrowed when money ran short. His letters to his friend Michael Puchberg, asking for loans, are among the most human documents in music: a genius explaining that he needs a hundred florins until Thursday. By the late 1780s, war with the Ottoman Empire and a shrinking Viennese concert public made things worse. In 1787 his father Leopold died, and the same year Mozart took the modest post of imperial chamber composer, a sinecure that paid little but gave him standing. He was, by then, the most gifted composer in Europe, and still poor.

Mozart's operatic peak came in partnership with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Venetian priest, poet and adventurer who had been appointed imperial court poet in Vienna. Together they made three operas that remain at the centre of the repertoire: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cosi fan tutte (1790). Figaro, based on Beaumarchais's scandalous play, which the Emperor had banned, is a comedy of servants outwitting masters that ends not in punishment but in forgiveness. Its Countess sings one of the most heartbreaking arias ever written, and its finale turns a household quarrel into a vision of mercy.

Don Giovanni, premiered in Prague in October 1787, is the opposite: a drama about a nobleman who seduces, lies and murders, and who refuses to repent even when dragged to hell by the statue of the man he killed. Mozart gives the villain the most seductive music in the opera, and the final scene, with the statue arriving at dinner and the orchestra sounding the trombones of damnation, remains one of the most terrifying moments in all opera. Prague adored it, and Don Giovanni became the city's favourite work. Cosi fan tutte, the third of the trilogy, is subtler and stranger: two officers test their fiancées' fidelity by disguising themselves, and the opera ends with no one quite sure what fidelity means. Audiences in Mozart's time found it shocking; later generations found it profound.

Mozart's operas work because he understood character through music. Each person on stage has a musical fingerprint: the Countess's long, arching phrases, Figaro's quick patter, Don Giovanni's charm, Leporello's grumbling. He wrote for singers he knew, fitting music to their voices and personalities, and he built ensembles, duets, trios, sextets, in which several people sing different emotions at once and the audience hears them all. This ensemble writing, above all, is what later composers studied. Verdi, Wagner and Strauss all learned from Mozart that an opera could be a world, not just a string of arias.

In the summer of 1788, in the space of about six weeks, Mozart wrote his last three symphonies: No. 39 in E flat, No. 40 in G minor and No. 41 in C major, the Jupiter. No one knows for whom they were written; there is no record of a commission or a performance in his lifetime. Together they are the summit of the classical symphony: the 39th warm and ceremonial, the 40th urgent and anguished, with one of the most famous openings in music, and the Jupiter ending with a finale that weaves five themes into a fugue of staggering craft while sounding effortless. The three symphonies were written in a summer when Mozart was borrowing money and his infant daughter had just died, and they show nothing of it except, perhaps, the depth that grief gives to joy.

The final year, 1791, was one of the most productive of his life. He wrote the opera La clemenza di Tito for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague, the clarinet concerto for his friend Anton Stadler, the motet Ave verum corpus, and The Magic Flute, a German-language opera with the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, which premiered in Vienna on 30 September 1791. The Magic Flute is a fairy tale about a prince, a birdcatcher, a queen of the night and a temple of wisdom, and it mixes low comedy with Masonic symbolism and music of astonishing beauty. It was an immediate popular success, and it has never left the stage.

In the same months Mozart was working on the Requiem in D minor, commissioned anonymously by Count Walsegg, who wanted to pass it off as his own in memory of his wife. Mozart fell ill while writing it, grew convinced he was composing it for himself, and died on 5 December 1791 with the work unfinished. His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it from Mozart's sketches and instructions, and the Requiem as it is performed today is partly Süssmayr's work. The mystery of the masked stranger who commissioned it has fed two centuries of legend, most famously in the play and film Amadeus. What is certain is that the Requiem's opening, its Dies Irae and its Lacrimosa are among the most powerful sacred music ever written.

Mozart died at thirty-five, in debt, in a Vienna winter, of an illness that scholars still cannot identify with certainty. Rheumatic fever, kidney failure, streptococcal infection and poisoning have all been proposed; the poisoning theory, which blamed the court composer Antonio Salieri, has no evidence and was denied by Salieri himself, but it inspired Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri and, through it, the modern legend of the jealous rival. Constanze, left with two young sons and debts, arranged a simple funeral. Mozart was buried in a common grave at St. Marx Cemetery, as was customary in Vienna for his class, and the exact spot was later lost. The romantic image of a genius thrown into a pauper's ditch is exaggerated: the funeral followed the usual practice, and the grief of his friends was real.

Constanze proved a capable manager of his legacy. She organized memorial concerts, sold his manuscripts, secured a pension from the Emperor, and promoted his music through the publisher Johann Anton André, who bought the surviving manuscripts in 1799. Within a generation Mozart was no longer a working composer but a classic, and by the nineteenth century he was a monument: Beethoven revered him, Schubert worshipped him, and Chopin kept his scores at the piano. The catalogue of his works, compiled by Ludwig von Köchel in 1862, gives every piece a K number, from K. 1, a minuet written at five, to K. 626, the Requiem.

The legend of Mozart as the effortless child of nature has done him a disservice. The manuscripts show a composer who revised, sketched and laboured, and the letters show a man of strong opinions, earthy humour and fierce ambition. What remains astonishing is not that he wrote easily but that he wrote so much, so fast and so well, in every form available to him, while living a life of constant financial strain. He was, in Haydn's words to Leopold, the greatest composer known to me, either in person or by name. Haydn meant it as praise. Posterity has treated it as a statement of fact.

Mozart matters because his music is the clearest example of a paradox at the heart of the art: that the most carefully constructed works can sound like the most natural. A Mozart concerto is a machine of balances, themes, keys and proportions, yet it feels like conversation. A Mozart opera is a structure of ensembles and recitatives, yet it feels like life. Musicians study him because his writing reveals the grammar of classical music in its purest form, and listeners love him because the grammar never gets in the way of the feeling. His piano concertos, his late symphonies and his operas are the core repertoire of every orchestra and opera house in the world.

He also matters as a figure of the Enlightenment. Mozart lived in the age of Voltaire and Joseph II, of the American and French revolutions, and his music carries the era's ideals: reason, balance, tolerance and the belief that human beings are equal in dignity. The Marriage of Figaro, with its servant hero and its forgiving ending, is an Enlightenment manifesto in comedy. The Magic Flute, with its temple of wisdom and its trials by fire and water, is an Enlightenment parable. And the Requiem, written as its composer died, is a reminder that the same age that believed in reason also believed in judgment, mercy and the life beyond. Mozart's music holds all of it at once, and that is why it endures.

• 1756 – Born on 27 January in Salzburg, the seventh child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart.
• 1761 – Composes his first short pieces at five; performs publicly soon after.
• 1762 – First great tour: Munich and Vienna, where the six-year-old plays before Empress Maria Theresa.
• 1764 – In London, writes his first symphony at eight during the family's long European tour.
• 1770 – In Rome at fourteen, writes out Allegri's Miserere from memory after one hearing in the Sistine Chapel.
• 1772 – Hieronymus Colloredo becomes Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg; Mozart serves as court organist and concertmaster.
• 1777 – Leaves Salzburg for Paris with his mother, seeking a post; the journey ends with her death in Paris in 1778.
• 1781 – Dismissed from the Archbishop's service in Vienna; stays in the city as a freelance musician.
• 1782 – Marries Constanze Weber. The Abduction from the Seraglio premieres to popular success.
• 1784 – Writes six piano concertos in a single year for his own subscription concerts in Vienna.
• 1786 – The Marriage of Figaro premieres in Vienna on 1 May; it is a triumph in Prague later that year.
• 1787 – Don Giovanni premieres in Prague. His father Leopold dies in Salzburg.
• 1788 – Writes his last three symphonies, Nos. 39, 40 and 41, the Jupiter, in about six weeks.
• 1791 – The Magic Flute premieres on 30 September. Works on the Requiem through the autumn.
• 1791 – Dies in Vienna on 5 December, aged thirty-five, with the Requiem unfinished. Buried in a common grave at St. Marx Cemetery.

Mozart's legacy is the central repertoire of Western classical music. His piano concertos defined the form, his late symphonies remain the standard against which symphonists are judged, and his operas, Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute above all, are performed in every opera house in the world. The Köchel catalogue, compiled in 1862, lists more than six hundred works, and new attributions and discoveries continue to this day.

He is also the archetype of the prodigy and the freelance artist. The child who toured Europe became the adult who tried to live by his pen alone, without a court post, and who died before that model was secure. Every later composer who lived by commissions, concerts and publication walked a road Mozart opened. His music, which seems to cost its composer nothing, remains the most humane sound the eighteenth century produced.

• Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (HarperCollins, 1995), the standard modern biography, drawing on the letters and the family papers.
• Volkmar Braunbehrens, Mozart in Vienna, 1781-1791 (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), on the freelance years, the money and the Viennese public.
• Robert Gutman, Mozart: A Cultural Biography (Harcourt, 1999), placing the composer in the world of the late Enlightenment.
• The letters of Mozart and his family, in the edition by Emily Anderson (Macmillan, 1938; revised), the primary source for his life and opinions.
• The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, custodian of the composer's birthplace, manuscripts and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe.
• The Köchel catalogue, first compiled by Ludwig von Köchel in 1862 and revised by later scholars, the standard numbering of Mozart's works.
• Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work (Oxford University Press, 1945), the classic critical study of the music.
• Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe, editors, The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), for dates, works and context.