Chances are that if you asked random students on campus to name a classical composer, Mozart would be one of the best-known names. A child-prodigy whose life and career were cut short by illness, he stands as one of the truly great talents of music history.
He created masterworks in all the major genres, though he is perhaps best known for his operas. This sets him apart from Haydn and Beethoven, who composed relatively little for the operatic stage. Figure 1. Mozart c. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood.
Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in , he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death.
The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons. He composed over works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. This was the capital of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, an ecclesiastic principality in what is now Austria, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was the youngest of seven children, five of whom died in infancy. Figure 2.
Leopold Mozart, a native of Augsburg, was a minor composer and an experienced teacher. In , he was appointed as fourth violinist in the musical establishment of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the ruling Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Four years later, he married Anna Maria in Salzburg. When Nannerl was seven, she began keyboard lessons with her father while her three-year-old brother looked on.
