Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

1756–1791, AUSTRIAN

Mozart is a towering figure in Western classical music. He died at the age of 35, having composed in his short life more than 600 works, including 22 operas, 23 piano concertos, and 41 symphonies.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
This posthumous portrait was made in 1819 by Viennese painter Barbara Krafft. Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, thought it to be a good likeness of the composer.

IN CONTEXT

Salzburg

In Mozart’s day, the city of Salzburg was ruled by its archbishop as an independent state, although it was part of the wider Hapsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire, with its capital at Vienna. With a population of less than 20,000, the city supported elaborate court and ecclesiastical life and was embellished with fine Baroque architecture. Despite its many splendors, Mozart despised Salzburg as a backwater, deriding its court musicians as “coarse, slovenly, dissolute.” In 1803, the city lost its independence and eventually became part of Austria.

SALZBURG BENEATH THE GREEN DOMES OF ITS BAROQUE CATHEDRAL

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756. His father, Leopold, was employed as a musician at the court of Salzburg’s ruling prince-archbishop. Leopold was a competent composer who attained some renown as the author of a manual on violin technique, but the family was both short of money and low in status, living in a rented apartment above a grocery shop.

Musical prodigy

Wolfgang Amadeus was the seventh and last child in the family, and the second to survive. His sister Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, was four years his senior. Taught by their father, both children proved exceptionally gifted, but Wolfgang exceeded his sister in talent and precocity. He could play pieces on the keyboard at the age of four and created his first simple compositions at age five. Realizing that his son was a prodigy, Leopold embarked on a campaign to exploit the opportunity this presented for immediate financial gain and for the child’s longer-term success in life. In 1762, the Mozarts set off on the first of a series of show tours that were to continue for more than a decade. Leopold took both children to perform in Munich and then in Vienna, where they were exhibited to the formidable Austrian Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa at the Schönbrunn Palace. Showing a disregard for social distances that was to last through his life, Wolfgang spontaneously kissed the empress. Royals, nobles, and ambassadors were suitably impressed by the children’s precocious musical skills but, whether because of Wolfgang’s inappropriate embrace or Leopold’s upstart pushiness, they did not win the empress’s patronage.

FIRST VIOLIN
Mozart’s first violin was a workmanlike instrument made in Salzburg in the 1740s by Andreas Ferdinand Mayr, luthier to the archbishop’s court and a musician colleague of Leopold Mozart.

Tours and triumphs

Returning to Salzburg in 1763, Leopold was promoted to deputy master of the chapel at the prince-archbishop’s court and immediately took another, longer leave of absence. The family traveled to Paris, where the children performed in front of the French king Louis XV, and then on to London, where they stayed for over a year in 1764–1765, giving many public concerts. They were befriended by composer Johann Christian Bach, a son of Johann Sebastian Bach who was a prominent figure on London’s music scene. J.C. Bach’s lucid but dramatic and emotional compositional style was to be a major influence on Mozart’s development.

Back in Salzburg from late 1766, the family made another foray to Vienna only nine months later, again in search of elusive imperial patronage. The family’s constant journeying, mostly by coach on poor quality roads, was arduous and hazardous. Both of the children contracted serious illnesses, Wolfgang coming close to dying of rheumatic fever in 1767. Moreover, the costs of travel and lodging used up much of the money gained from public performances. But Leopold’s will and ambition were implacable—the second journey to Vienna had been undertaken despite a smallpox epidemic gripping the city.

Mozart’s last tours as a paraded prodigy were three circuits of Italy with his father between 1770 and 1773. The first was triumphant: he was made a member of the musical academy in Bologna; in Rome the pope created him a knight of the Golden Spur; and he wrote an Italian opera, Mitridate, re di Ponto, which was staged in Milan just before he turned 15. However, his second two visits to Italy were met with less enthusiasm; by 1773, he was simply too old to be marketed as a prodigy.

Wolfgang had been accorded the post of concert master at the Salzburg prince-archbishop’s court at age 13 and his stipend—together with that of his father—enabled the family to move into better accommodations. They became celebrities in the town in which many of Mozart’s new compositions were performed. However, the accession of a new prince-archbishop, who was less well disposed toward music, made their position at court more precarious.

FAMILY GROUP
A 1781 painting by the Austrian artist Johann Nepomuk della Croce shows Leopold Mozart holding a violin, with his children Wolfgang and Nannerl seated at the piano. A portrait of their deceased mother hangs on the wall.

An independent spirit

In 1778, at his father’s urging, Mozart again embarked on his travels in search of wealthy patronage. Leopold stayed in Salzburg, worried he might lose his post if he went away again, and Mozart was instead accompanied by his mother. In Paris—a foreign city in which they were friendless and isolated—disaster struck: Mozart’s mother died of a sudden illness. His father irrationally blamed Wolfgang, who returned to Salzburg. From this point, Mozart became set on escaping from his father’s controlling influence.

Mozart’s personality, warped by the adulation he had received as a child, lacked the balance and elevated qualities found in his music. He indulged an earthy taste for young women and his letters display a scatological sense of humor. He was tactlessly arrogant and never troubled to conceal his sense of superiority. Being treated as a paid servant—the effective status of a musician at that time—made him furious. In 1781, after a row with a Salzburg court official and Mozart’s subsequent dismissal with an undignified kick in the behind for his insolence, he decided to try to make his living in Vienna as a freelance composer, piano performer, and music teacher.

Marriage and finances

Having lost his regular income, Mozart compounded his financial worries by marrying a woman without money. He had been pursuing Aloysia Weber, a soprano who was the daughter of a poor bass player. When she jilted him, he turned his attention to her younger sister Constanze. Under pressure from the Weber family, who threatened him with legal action, in 1782 he formalized the liaison. Children soon followed—Constanze eventually bore six offspring, of whom two survived infancy. The marriage was a success emotionally but placed demands on Mozart’s finances that were often hard to meet.

MITRIDATE, RE DI PONTO
This page of sheet music for Mozart’s early opera dates from its first performance in 1770. The work was a huge success at the Milan carnival and was given a further 21 performances—a powerful endorsement of the composer’s talent.

CONSTANZE MOZART, 1802
A portrait by Danish painter Hans Hansen depicts Mozart’s wife. The composer’s marriage brought him happiness but also his father’s strong disapproval.

IN CONTEXT

Freemasonry

Freemasonry was fashionable in the 18th century. Aristocrats and royalty became Masons. Mozart was admitted to a Masonic lodge in 1784 and his late opera The Magic Flute allegedly contains Masonic symbolism and expresses Masonic ideals of universal brotherhood. From the late 18th century, Catholics and monarchists in Europe came to view the Masons as a dangerous organization, subversive of the authority of the Church and kings. It is not known whether it had such political significance for Mozart.

MASONIC INITIATION WITH MOZART SEATED ON THE FAR LEFT

Creative intensity

In the first half of the 1780s, Mozart’s compositional output flourished. After his opera Idomeneo was a success in Munich in 1781, he wrote the German-language Singspiel (opera with dialogue) Die Entführung aus dem Serail for performance at Vienna’s Burgtheater, an institution sponsored by Maria Theresa’s successor, Emperor Joseph II. Opening in 1782, Die Entführung proved a major triumph. It tells the story of the hero Belmonte’s attempt to rescue his beloved Constanze from a harem. Mozart’s other works in this fruitful period include some of his finest piano concertos, a notable series of six string quartets dedicated to Haydn, and two of his best-known symphonies, the “Haffner” (1782) and the “Linz” (1783).

After a lengthy search for the right follow-up to Die Entführung, Mozart found his ideal librettist in the Italian poet Lorenzo da Ponte (see box). The result was Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). First performed in the Burgtheater in 1786, it raised opera to a new level with the realism of its characterization subtly expressed in music. A tale of class and sexual politics, Le nozze chimed with Mozart’s rebellion against aristocratic arrogance. It was very well received, but failed to match the success of Die Entführung in Mozart’s lifetime.

In 1787, Mozart made his first visit to Prague, a city that took him to its heart. His second collaboration with da Ponte, Don Giovanni, was written for performance at Prague’s Estates Theatre, where it premiered in October. Performances in Vienna followed in 1788, although Emperor Joseph was again worried by the complexity of the music, which he declared “too difficult for the singers.”

IDOMENEO, FIRST PRINT, 1781
Mozart’s Idomeneo, perhaps his greatest “serious opera,” tells of King Idomeneo’s promise to Neptune, god of the sea, to sacrifice the first person he sees in return for safe passage over the ocean. The first person Idomeneo sees is his very own son, Idamante—but in a change of heart, Neptune agrees to spare him if Idomeneo gives up his throne to the young man.

PRAGUE PIANO
During his visits to Prague, Mozart is believed to have stayed at Bertramka, home of the Czech composer František Dušek. It is likely that he played this piano at the house, and may have composed parts of Don Giovanni on the instrument.

IN PROFILE

Lorenzo da Ponte

The librettist for three of Mozart’s finest operas, da Ponte was born of Jewish parents in Venice in 1749. After converting to Catholicism, he was ordained a priest in 1773 and became a poet. By 1785, when he first worked with Mozart, he held a post at the imperial court in Vienna. In total, he wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including Mozart. In the 1790s, he migrated first to Britain and then to the US. Settled in New York, he became the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College and opened the city’s first opera house. He died in New York in 1838.

LORENZO DA PONTE, 1759

Late works

When Leopold Mozart died in May 1787, Wolfgang’s compositional powers were at their peak. The three great symphonies he wrote in the summer of 1788 (Nos. 39, 40, and 41) were the crowning achievement of his orchestral writing. The comic opera Cosìfan tutte, first staged in 1790, completed his trio of successful collaborations with da Ponte. La clemenza di Tito, a rapidly written opera seria, was performed in Prague in 1791 as part of the official celebrations of the coronation of a new emperor, Leopold II.

Although sometimes seriously short of ready money, Mozart was a star in the musical firmament and had no reason to despair of future patronage. His last completed masterpiece, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), premiered at a popular suburban Viennese theater in September 1791. It was a triumph, drawing impressive crowds.

Death and legacy

Mozart was at work on a Requiem Mass, commissioned by an Austrian aristocrat, when a fever confined him to bed. He died on December 5, 1791, hastened to the tomb by the fatal attentions of ignorant doctors. His burial followed the common custom of his time and place—a shared, unmarked grave and no mourners. Fanciful accounts of Mozart’s death began appearing soon after the event, but no evidence exists to support such fantasies as his alleged poisoning by court musician and jealous rival Antonio Salieri. His music surged in popularity after his death and was a major influence on Beethoven, among many others. In the Romantic period, his music partially fell out of favor but his standing revived in the 20th century. On his bicentenary in 1991, he was hailed by many commentators as the greatest composer of all time.

BURGTHEATER, VIENNA
Created in 1741 by the Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa, the Burgtheater was directly connected to her home in the Hofburg Palace. Three of Mozart’s operas premiered at the theater, which moved to larger premises in 1888.