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Wolfgang Mozart Biography Facts Birthday and Life Story

Wolfgang Mozart Biography Facts Birthday and Life Story

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791), Austrian composer, who is considered one of the most brilliant

As a child prodigy Mozart toured Europe and became widely regarded as a miracle of nature because of his musical gifts as a performer of piano, harpsichord, and organ and as a composer of instrumental and vocal music. His mature masterpieces begin with the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major (Jeunehomme, 1777), one of about a dozen outstanding concertos he wrote for piano. Also successful as an opera composer, Mozart wrote three exceptional Italian operas to texts by Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte: Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (All Women Do So, 1790). They were followed in 1791 by his supreme German opera, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

Mozart’s works were catalogued chronologically by Austrian music bibliographer Ludwig von Köchel, who published his catalog in 1862. The numbers he assigned, which are called Köchel numbers and are preceded by the initial K, remain the standard way of referring to works by Mozart. The Jeunehomme Concerto, for example, is K. 271.

II  LIFE
and versatile composers ever. He worked in all musical genres of his era, wrote inspired works in each genre, and produced an extraordinary number of compositions, especially considering his short life. By the time Mozart died at age 35, he had completed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 17 piano sonatas, 7 major operas, and numerous works for voice and other instruments.

Mozart was born in Salzburg. From his father, violinist and composer Leopold Mozart, he received his early musical training. By age six he had become an accomplished performer on the clavier, violin, and organ and was highly skilled in sight-reading and musical improvisation. In 1762 Leopold took his six-year-old son on his first concert tour through the courts of Europe. The young Mozart absorbed the musical styles of the time through travel to Austria’s capital, Vienna; the German cities of Munich and Mannheim; Paris, France; London, England; and various centers in Italy. From 1762 to 1766, while he was often touring, he composed several symphonies, a few sacred works, and a number of sonatas for keyboard and violin.

In London in 1764 Mozart met then-popular German composer Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. The eight-year-old Mozart played four-hand piano sonatas with Bach while sitting on the composer’s lap. The symphonies of the younger Bach and of Carl Friedrich Abel, another German composer living in London, offered models for Mozart’s first symphonies (K. 16 and K. 19), written in 1764 and 1765 when he was eight and nine years old. In 1767, at age 11, Mozart transformed piano sonatas by various composers into his first four piano concertos through the addition of interludes and episodes for orchestra. He intended these works (K. 37, K. 39, K. 40, and K. 41) for his own performance. In 1768 he composed his first opera buffa (comic opera), La finta semplice (The Simple Pretense), and his first German operetta, Bastien und Bastienne. The following year La finta semplice was performed at the palace of the Salzburg archbishop, who appointed Mozart his concertmaster.

From 1769 to 1773, Mozart made three extended journeys to Italy with his father, during which he was remarkably productive and wrote not only symphonies and operas but also string quartets and several sacred works. In Milan he was commissioned to write an opera seria—that is, a serious opera in Italian on a heroic subject. The opera, Mitridati, rè di Ponto (Mithridates, King of Pontus), was produced in 1770 in Milan under Mozart’s direction with success. Also that year the pope made Mozart a knight of the Order of the Golden Spur.

III  MUSIC

Mozart’s music can be divided into periods of stylistic assimilation and stylistic innovation. From childhood he showed skill at imitating virtually any type of music, including the sacred style of church music and the so-called galant (courtly) idiom. The elegant though often superficial galant style dominated much instrumental music of the 1760s and 1770s. Mozart’s mastery often demonstrates itself in an ability to expand and deepen the stylistic possibilities of the time. The manner in which he extended the character and form of the concerto, for instance, owes much to his experience in writing operatic arias.

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