Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Chapter 1 · The Child on Display

Salzburg, and ten years on the roads of Europe

1756 – 1773 · Salzburg · Vienna · Paris · London · Rome

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756. His father Leopold was a violinist and composer in the archbishop's service and the author of a well-known violin treatise. His sister Maria Anna, called Nannerl, was five years older and, on the evidence of contemporaries, a formidable keyboard player in her own right; she stopped performing publicly when she reached marriageable age, and the family's ambitions concentrated on her brother.

Leopold recognised what he had and organised it. From 1762 he took the children on tours that lasted years — Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Netherlands — where they performed for courts, played blindfolded, improvised on given themes and were examined for evidence of trickery. In London the eight-year-old was studied by the Royal Society's Daines Barrington, whose report survives.

The travelling was also an education no conservatoire could have matched. In London he met Johann Christian Bach and absorbed his elegant style; in Italy between 1769 and 1773 he learned opera from the source. In Rome in 1770 he heard Allegri's *Miserere*, whose score the Vatican guarded, and wrote it out from memory — a feat widely reported at the time. The Pope made him a Knight of the Golden Spur.

He was also frequently and dangerously ill on these journeys, and the years of travel earned far less money than Leopold had hoped.

Why this matters

Mozart's childhood tours gave him direct knowledge of every major European musical style — which is why his mature music absorbs Italian opera, German counterpoint and French elegance so fluently.

You have met the child performing for kings. What would you ask him about it?

Ask Mozart

• “What was it like being exhibited to European courts as a child?”
• “What happened to your sister's career?”
• “How did you write out the Miserere from memory?”
• “What did you learn in Italy that you could not learn at home?”
• “What did your father want the tours to achieve?”

Chapter 2 · The Salzburg Trap

A job he hated, a journey that ended in grief

1773 – 1781 · Salzburg · Mannheim · Paris

Back in Salzburg, Mozart worked as court organist and concertmaster for Archbishop Colloredo, a reforming ruler who wanted shorter church music and had no interest in indulging a famous employee. Mozart found the post confining, the orchestra inadequate, and the town too small for the operas he wanted to write. His letters from these years are full of contempt for it.

In 1777 he was refused leave, resigned, and set out to find a position elsewhere, accompanied by his mother because Leopold could not go. It was a failure. At Mannheim, home of Europe's finest orchestra, he found no post but did fall in love with the singer Aloysia Weber, which alarmed his father into ordering him on to Paris.

Paris went badly. He was treated as a former child star rather than a serious composer, endured aristocratic rudeness, and struggled for commissions. Then, in July 1778, his mother fell ill and died in their lodgings. He was twenty-two, alone in a foreign city, and had to break the news home; he wrote first to a family friend, asking him to prepare his father, before writing the truth.

He returned to Salzburg in 1779 to a job he resented more than ever. The break came in 1781 in Vienna, where Colloredo treated him as a servant; after weeks of confrontation he resigned, and was dismissed from the archbishop's antechamber with a kick from the court steward — an indignity he described in detail and never forgot.

Why this matters

Mozart's break with Colloredo was one of the first cases of a major composer walking away from secure court employment to work independently — and it defined the rest of his short life.

You have watched a young man break out of a secure job. What would you ask him?

Ask Mozart

• “What made Salzburg unbearable for you?”
• “Why did the Paris journey fail?”
• “How did you cope with your mother dying in Paris?”
• “Was resigning from the archbishop's service worth the risk?”
• “How did your father react to your decisions?”

Chapter 3 · The Freelance Years

Concerts, pupils, publishers and Constanze

1781 – 1786 · Vienna

Vienna in the 1780s had a public concert culture, a piano-owning middle class and a taste for German-language opera — enough of a market for a composer to live on without a patron, if he worked constantly.

Mozart did. He gave subscription concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos, taught wealthy pupils, sold works to publishers and wrote to commission. In 1784 alone he performed at over twenty concerts in six weeks. His income in the mid-1780s was substantial by Viennese professional standards; his later difficulties came from irregular earnings, illness, expensive habits and the collapse of the concert market during the war with the Ottoman Empire, not from lifelong poverty.

He married Constanze Weber, Aloysia's younger sister, in 1782 against his father's wishes. They had six children, of whom two survived infancy. The surviving letters between them are affectionate, and Constanze later played a substantial part in preserving and publishing his music.

He joined the Freemasons in 1784, and the order's ideals of brotherhood and enlightenment appear in several works, most obviously *The Magic Flute*.

Haydn, thirty years his senior, became a friend; Mozart dedicated six string quartets to him in 1785, and Haydn told Leopold that his son was the greatest composer known to him. *The Marriage of Figaro* followed in 1786 — an opera based on a play banned in Vienna for its mockery of aristocratic privilege, and one in which the servants outwit the count.

Why this matters

Mozart's Vienna years show the emergence of a market for music: concerts sold by subscription, scores sold to a middle-class public, and a composer surviving without a permanent employer.

You have seen the freelance life in full flow. What would you ask him?

Ask Mozart

• “How did you actually earn a living without a court post?”
• “Why choose a banned play as the basis for Figaro?”
• “What did joining the Freemasons mean to you?”
• “What did Haydn's friendship give you?”
• “Why did you marry Constanze against your father's wishes?”

Chapter 4 · Three Operas That Changed the Form

Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte

1786 – 1790 · Vienna · Prague

The collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte produced three works that reset what opera could do with character.

Before Mozart, comic opera generally kept types apart: nobles were serious, servants were funny. In *The Marriage of Figaro* (1786) everyone is complicated. The Countess's aria of loneliness sits inside a farce; Figaro and Susanna are cleverer than their master; and the Count's final plea for forgiveness produces a moment of genuine moral seriousness that stops the comedy dead.

*Don Giovanni* (Prague, 1787) is stranger still — labelled a *dramma giocoso*, a jolly drama, and containing seduction, murder, comedy and a statue that arrives to drag its unrepentant villain to hell. Nineteenth-century Romantics treated it as the greatest opera ever written and argued endlessly about whether Giovanni is a monster or a kind of terrible freedom.

*Così fan tutte* (1790) is the most uncomfortable: two men test their fiancées' fidelity in disguise, win the bet, and the ending resolves nothing honestly. The nineteenth century found it immoral and often rewrote it; the twentieth found it painfully modern.

Mozart's method in all three is ensemble writing — several characters singing simultaneously, each with their own words, motives and music, so that the audience follows a whole social situation at once. No composer had achieved that density of simultaneous characterisation before.

Why this matters

The Da Ponte operas made opera a medium for psychological realism: characters who change, contradict themselves and are understood through music rather than described by it.

You have three of the greatest operas in front of you. What would you ask him?

Ask Mozart

• “How do you make several characters singing at once still make sense?”
• “Is Don Giovanni meant to be admired or condemned?”
• “Why does the Count's forgiveness at the end of Figaro matter so much?”
• “What were you and Da Ponte trying to do in Così fan tutte?”
• “Why did Prague take to your music more warmly than Vienna?”

Chapter 5 · The Last Year and the Myths

The Magic Flute, the Requiem, and what really happened

1791 and after · Vienna

1791 was busy, not tragic. Mozart wrote the opera *La clemenza di Tito* for a coronation in Prague, the Clarinet Concerto, and *The Magic Flute*, which opened in a suburban theatre in September and was a popular success — a fairy-tale opera in German with Masonic symbolism, written for a company that included the actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder.

The Requiem was commissioned anonymously through an intermediary. The patron was Count Franz von Walsegg, an amateur who intended to pass the work off as his own in memory of his wife. Mozart fell ill in November and died on 5 December 1791, aged thirty-five, leaving it unfinished. Constanze, needing the fee, had it completed — mostly by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, whose contributions scholars still try to disentangle.

Three myths need correcting. He was not poisoned by Antonio Salieri; the rumour spread after Salieri's mental collapse decades later and was cemented by Pushkin's play and, much later, *Amadeus*. He was not buried in a pauper's grave; he received a simple communal burial of the ordinary middle-class kind, which Viennese regulations of the period encouraged. And the cause of death is unknown: the contemporary record says severe miliary fever, and modern candidates include acute rheumatic fever and a streptococcal infection leading to kidney failure.

What is beyond dispute is the output: over six hundred works, including 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, some twenty-two stage works, and chamber music that remains at the centre of the repertoire.

Why this matters

Mozart's death is one of the most mythologised in cultural history, which makes it an ideal case for teaching students to trace where a widely believed story actually came from.

You have reached the last year and the legends. What would you ask him?

Ask Mozart

• “How did the anonymous Requiem commission come about?”
• “Where did the story that Salieri poisoned you come from?”
• “What were you trying to do differently in The Magic Flute?”
• “How much of the finished Requiem is actually yours?”
• “Why has the story of your burial been so exaggerated?”

What Mozart changed

Mozart brought the classical style to a point of balance that later composers treated as a standard rather than a stage. He transformed the piano concerto into a dramatic dialogue, gave opera characters a psychological depth it had not had, and demonstrated that a composer could survive on a public market rather than a patron's salary.

A debate that continues

Scholars still dispute how much of the Requiem is Mozart's own, how serious his financial difficulties really were in his final years, and how far the myth of effortless genius has distorted the evidence of his relentless working method.

Keep exploring — ask Mozart

• “How much did you revise, and how much arrived complete?”
• “What did you want The Magic Flute's audience to take away?”
• “What would you have written next if you had lived another twenty years?”

Related lives

• Ludwig van Beethoven — Master of the Symphony
• Marie Antoinette — Queen of France and Navarre
• Michelangelo — Il Divino · Sculptor of the Sistine

Related themes

Classical music and the Enlightenment · Opera and drama · Patronage and the artist