Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, then an independent church state within the Holy Roman Empire ruled by a prince-archbishop ^[1]. He was baptized the following day as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, the seventh and last child of Leopold Mozart, a violinist and composer in the archbishop's court orchestra, and Anna Maria Pertl. Only two of the couple's children survived infancy: Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna, known in the family as Nannerl ^[1].

Leopold, author of a widely used violin treatise published in the year of his son's birth, quickly recognized that both children possessed unusual gifts. Nannerl was a skilled keyboard player, but Wolfgang's abilities went further. By the age of four he was learning short pieces at the harpsichord, and by five he was composing small works that his father wrote down for him ^[2]. Leopold gradually set aside his own ambitions as a composer to manage the education and promotion of his children.

The family home on the Getreidegasse in Salzburg, now a museum, was the setting for an intense musical apprenticeship. Wolfgang absorbed counterpoint, keyboard technique, and violin playing under his father's methodical instruction, an education that no conservatory of the time could have matched ^[3].

In 1762 Leopold began presenting his children at the courts of Europe. Early trips to Munich and Vienna, where the six year old Wolfgang played for Empress Maria Theresa, led to a grand tour lasting from 1763 to 1766 that took the family through Germany, Brussels, Paris, London, and the Netherlands ^[2]. In London the boy met Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose graceful Italianate style left a lasting mark on the child's earliest symphonies, written there at the age of eight ^[4].

Audiences tested the prodigy with sight reading, improvisation, and playing with the keyboard covered by a cloth. In 1770, during the first of three Italian journeys, the fourteen year old famously wrote out Gregorio Allegri's Miserere from memory after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel, a work the papal choir guarded closely ^[1]. That same year Pope Clement XIV made him a Knight of the Golden Spur, and his opera Mitridate, re di Ponto succeeded on the Milan stage ^[4].

Back home, Mozart entered the service of the Salzburg court, eventually as concertmaster and later court organist. The post gave him steady if modest income and time to compose symphonies, serenades, masses, and his first mature piano concertos. Yet Salzburg offered no opera house worth the name, and its new ruler, Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, had little patience for a restless employee who kept requesting leave to seek work elsewhere ^[3]. A long job hunting journey through Mannheim and Paris in 1777 and 1778 brought no permanent position and one heavy blow: his mother, who had accompanied him, died in Paris in July 1778 ^[2].

The rupture came in 1781. Summoned to Vienna in the archbishop's entourage, Mozart chafed at being seated with the servants and forbidden to perform for his own profit. After repeated confrontations he was dismissed, by his own account with a kick from the court steward, and he chose to remain in Vienna as one of Europe's first prominent freelance musicians ^[1]. The gamble looked reckless to Leopold, but the capital rewarded it at first. Mozart earned money from subscription concerts, teaching aristocratic pupils, publishing, and commissions.

His German opera The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) was an immediate success and spread his name across German speaking Europe ^[4]. The mid 1780s were his most prosperous stretch. Between 1784 and 1786 he produced a dozen piano concertos for his own concerts, works that transformed the genre into a dramatic conversation between soloist and orchestra ^[2]. He also joined the Freemasons in 1784, and Masonic ideals of brotherhood and enlightenment surface in several later works ^[3].

A friendship with Joseph Haydn shaped these years as well. Mozart dedicated a set of six string quartets to the older master, who told Leopold in 1785 that his son was the greatest composer known to him, whether in person or by name ^[1]. The remark, recorded by Leopold in a letter, remains one of the most quoted judgments in music history.

Any account of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart achievements must begin with opera. With the court poet Lorenzo Da Ponte he created three works that anchor the repertoire of every major opera house: The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cosi fan tutte (1790) ^[4]. Figaro, based on a Beaumarchais play that had been banned as politically dangerous, turned servants into fully drawn human beings and layered ensembles of unprecedented complexity. Don Giovanni, written for Prague, where Mozart enjoyed his warmest public, fused comedy with a darkness the eighteenth century stage had rarely attempted ^[2].

His instrumental output was equally consequential. The 27 piano concertos, the clarinet concerto and clarinet quintet, the last ten string quartets, and the string quintets set standards their successors measured themselves against. In the summer of 1788 he completed his final three symphonies, numbers 39, 40, and 41, in roughly six weeks ^[1]. The last of these, later nicknamed the Jupiter, closes with a finale that combines five themes in simultaneous counterpoint, a display of technique worn with complete ease.

The scale of the whole is hard to grasp. Ludwig von Kochel's chronological catalogue, first published in 1862 and still the standard numbering system, lists over 600 compositions covering nearly every form of the period ^[5]. Almost none of it reads as routine. Composers from Beethoven to the present have studied his scores as models of proportion, melodic invention, and dramatic timing ^[3].

In August 1782 Mozart married Constanze Weber, a singer from a musical family he had first met in Mannheim years earlier, when he had briefly courted her older sister Aloysia ^[1]. Leopold gave his consent grudgingly and the relationship between father and son never fully recovered. The marriage itself, by most surviving evidence, was affectionate. Constanze bore six children, of whom two sons survived: Carl Thomas and Franz Xaver Wolfgang, the younger of whom also became a composer ^[2].

The family's finances swung widely. Mozart earned well by the standards of working musicians, yet he spent freely on lodgings, clothing, and billiards, and from 1788 he wrote a series of begging letters to his fellow Mason Michael Puchberg, a merchant who lent him substantial sums ^[3]. War with the Ottoman Empire had thinned Vienna's concert life, and Constanze's medical treatments at the spa town of Baden added costs. By 1791 his situation was improving, with the salaried post of assistant Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Cathedral in prospect ^[1].

Contemporaries described a short, slight man, animated and fond of jokes, dancing, and wordplay, with none of the solemnity later generations projected onto him. His letters, hundreds of which survive, show a quick, earthy, sometimes coarse humor alongside acute musical observation ^[2].

The final year of Mozart's life was among his busiest. In 1791 he completed the opera La clemenza di Tito for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague, the clarinet concerto for his friend Anton Stadler, and The Magic Flute, a German singspiel written with the actor and impresario Emanuel Schikaneder for a popular suburban theater ^[4]. The Magic Flute opened on September 30, 1791, and drew growing crowds through the autumn, a success Mozart followed with delight.

That summer a stranger had commissioned a Requiem mass anonymously. The patron was Count Franz von Walsegg, who intended to pass the work off as his own in memory of his wife, though romantic legend later turned the messenger into an omen of death ^[3]. Mozart worked on the score through the fall as his health failed. He took to his bed on November 20 with fever, swelling, and pain, and died in his Vienna apartment shortly before one in the morning on December 5, 1791, at the age of 35 ^[1].

The official register listed severe miliary fever; modern scholars have proposed rheumatic fever, kidney failure, and other causes, and the question remains open ^[2]. Persistent stories that he was poisoned by the composer Antonio Salieri have no documentary support. He was buried in a common grave at St. Marx cemetery outside the city walls, standard practice for ordinary Viennese citizens under the burial regulations of the time, not a pauper's disgrace as myth long held ^[3]. His pupil Franz Xaver Sussmayr completed the Requiem from his sketches.

Mozart's reputation, already high at his death, rose steadily afterward. Constanze, an able manager of the estate, organized memorial concerts, sold manuscripts to publishers, and with her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen produced an early biography published in 1828 ^[2]. Nineteenth century audiences made him a Romantic icon; twentieth century scholarship, built on the Kochel catalogue and the complete critical editions, recovered the working professional behind the legend ^[5].

The most common Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart facts hint at the scale of his influence: over 600 works, more than 20 operas, 41 numbered symphonies, and a body of concertos, quartets, and sacred music that remains central to concert life on every continent. Beethoven studied his scores closely, Chopin asked for his Requiem at his own funeral, and Tchaikovsky called him a musical Christ in his diary ^[3]. Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and the 1984 Milos Forman film adapted from it, winner of eight Academy Awards, carried a fictionalized version of his story to a mass audience ^[6].

Salzburg now hosts an annual festival built substantially around his music, his birthplace and Vienna apartment operate as museums, and recordings of his work number in the tens of thousands. Any Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart biography ends at the same place: a musician dead at 35 whose language of clarity, balance, and human feeling became a permanent reference point for Western music ^[1].