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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart was one of the (if not the) most important composer (s) of the Classical era. His accomplishments in musical composition were outstanding against the others of his time. He was a child prodigy, finishing his first opera at the age of twelve, and in his later life went on to even more amazing things. Though we always hear of Mozart's wonderful achievements, we hardly ever hear about the hard later life of alcohol abuse and horrible misfortune with children he had which ended in his mysterious death at a very young age. Mozart was, for the lack of a better word, amazing, and his musical styles and compositions can still be heard today and enjoyed as much as they were 200 years ago. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, the son of Leopold, Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.
By the age of three, he could play the piano, and he was composing by the time he was five. Mozart's older sister, Maria Anna (best known as Nannerl) was also a gifted keyboard player, and in 1762 their father took the two prodigies on a short performing tour of the courts at Vienna and Munich. Encouraged by their warm reception, they embarked the next year on a longer tour, including two weeks at Versailles, where the children enchanted King Louis XV. From that time on, young Mozart was constantly performing and writing music. Wherever he appeared, people were in awe of his magnificent talents. By his early teens, he had mastered the piano, violin and harpsichord, and was writing keyboard pieces, oratorios, symphonies, and operas.
In 1764 Mozart, Leopold, and Nannerl arrived in London. Here Mozart wrote his first three symphonies under the influence of Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, who lived in the city. After their return to Salzburg there followed three trips to Italy between 1769 and 1773. Mozart s first major opera, Mitridate, was performed in Milan in 1770 to such unqualified raves that critics compared him to Handel. In Rome, Mozart heard a performance of Allegris Misery; no one was allowed to see or examine the score of this opera, but Mozart managed to transcribe the music almost perfectly from memory. On Mozart's first visit to Milan, his opera Mitridate, r di Ponte was successfully produced, followed on a later visit by Lucia Silla.
Mozart's opera, Lucia Silla, showed signs of the rich, full orchestration that characterizes his later operas. A trip to Vienna in 1773 failed to produce the court appointment that both Mozart and his father wished for him, but did introduce Mozart to the influence of Haydn, whose Sturm und Drang string quartets (Opus 20) had recently been published. Had s influence is clear in Mozart's Six String quartets, K 168 - 173, and in his Symphony in G minor, K 183. Another trip in search of patronage ended less happily. Accompanied by his mother, Mozart left Salzburg in 1777, travelling through Mannheim to Paris. However, in July 1778 his mother died.
Nor was the trip a professional success: no longer able to pass for a prodigy, Mozart's reception there was muted and hopes of a job came to nothing. Back in Salzburg, Mozart worked for two years as a church organist for the new archbishop. Mozart s church music was considered to be too worldly, indeed operatic. Mozart did not really observe the well-established norm that the music should only serve the word and explain it. The Word inspired him and therefor enabled him to compose and glorify God in his own way.
His employer was less kindly disposed to the Mozart family than his predecessor had been, but the composer nonetheless produced some of his earliest masterpieces. The famous Sinfonia concertante for Violin, Video and Orchestra was written in 1780, and the following year Mozart's first great stage work, the opera, Idomeneo, was produced in Munich, where Mozart also wrote his Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments, K 361. On his return from Munich, however, the hostility brewing between him and the archbishop came to a head and Mozart resigned. On delivering his resignation he was verbally abused and eventually, physically ejected from the archbishops residence. Without patronage, Mozart was forced to confront the perils of a freelance existence. Initially his efforts met with some success.
He took up residence in Vienna and in 1782 his opera, Die Entf hunt aus dem Serial (The abdication from the Seraglio) was produced in the city and was well received. It has been told that Mozart once said, Since I could not have one sister, I married the other. Whether or not this quote is true, the facts remain the same. Three and a half years after a young musician named Aloysia Weber refused Mozart's marriage proposal; he married her younger sister, Constanze, in Vienna's St. Stephens Cathedral.
Constanze later bore him six children, but tragically lost most of them to death. The Mozart's first child, Raimund Leopold, died at the age of two months of an intestinal cramp while his parents were away on a visit to Salzburg. Their third child, Johann Thomas Leopold, lived less than a month, their fourth, Theresa, six months, and their fifth, Anna Maria, only one hour. The Mozart's were left with only two living children, whom Wolfgang barely had time to know.
Soon after his marriage to Constanze he initiated a series of subscription concerts at which he performed his piano concertos and improvised at the keyboard. Most of Mozart's great piano concertos were written for these concerts, including those in C, K 467, A, K 488 and C minor, K 491. In these concertos Mozart brought to the classical genre a unity and diversity it had not had before, combining bold symphonic richness with passages of subtle delicacy. In 1758, Mozart dedicated to Haydn the six string quartets that now bear Haydn's name. Included in this group are the quartets known as The Hunt, which make use of hunting calls, and The Dissonance, which opens with an eerie succession of dissonant chords. Overwhelmed by their quality, Haydn confessed to Leopold Mozart, Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.
The pieces are matched in excellence in Mozart's chamber music output only by his String Quintets, outstanding among which are those in C, K 515, G minor, K 516 and D, K 59 In addition, in 1758 Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte collaborated on the first of a series of operatic masterpieces. Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was begun that year and performed in 1786 to an enthusiastic audience in Vienna and even greater acclaim later in Prague. In 1787 Prague+s National Theatre saw the premiere of Don Giovanni, a moralizing version of the Don Juan legend in which the licentious nobleman receives his comeuppance and descends into the fiery regions of hell. The third and last da Ponte opera was Cos Fan Tutte (Women are All the Same), commissioned by Emperor Joseph II and produced at Vienna's Burgtheater in 1790.
Its cynical treatment of the theme of sexual infidelity may have been responsible for its relative lack of success with the Viennese, who responded with such enthusiasm to the comedy of Figaro. Mozart wrote two more operas: the opera series La Clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Tito) and Die Zauberfl te (The Magic Flute). The latter was commissioned by actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder. Its plot, a fairy tale combined with strong Masonic elements (Mozart was a devoted Freemason), is bizarre, but drew from Mozart some of his greatest music. When produced in 1791, two months before Mozart's death, the opera survived an initially cool reception and gradually won audiences over. The year 1788 saw the composition of Mozart's two finest symphonies.
Symphony No. 40, in the tragic key of G minor, contrasts strikingly with the affirmatory Symphony No. 41 Jupiter. Neither helped alleviate his financial plight, however, which after 1789 became critical. An extensive concert tour of Europe failed to earn significant sums. A new emperor came to the Austrian throne but Mozart was unsuccessful in his bid to become Kapellmeister. He was deeply in debt when in July 1791 he received an anonymous commission to write a Requiem. (The author of the commission was in fact Count Franz von Walsegg, who wished to pass off the work as his own. ) Mozart did not live to finish the Requiem. He became ill in autumn 1791 and died on December 5; his burial the next day was attended only by a gravedigger.
Rumours that Mozart had been poisoned abounded in Vienna after his death, many suggesting that rival composer Antonio Salieri was responsible. Many now believe a heart weakened by bouts of rheumatic fever caused his death. Mozart may have died of a number of illnesses. The official diagnosis was miliary fever, but the truth is that the physicians who attended him were never quite sure what Mozart died of. He suffered from rheumatic pain, headaches, toothaches, skin eruptions, and lethargy.
A common theory today is that Mozart died of uremia following chronic kidney disease. After Mozart's death, Constanze met and eventually married Nikolaus Von Nissen, an official in the Danish Embassy, and it was he who raised Mozart's sons. von Nissen died in 1826, and Constanze in 1842. The two boys led a fairly uneventful lives. The elder, Karl Thomas (b. 1784), ended up as a minor official on the staff of the Viceroy of Naples in Milan. He died in 1858.
The younger, Franz Xavier Wolfgang, inherited his fathers musical inclinations, if not all of his talent. He composed and conducted extensively throughout Europe, but perhaps the last word on this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the Younger was best spoken by George Bernard Shaw in a letter he wrote in 1897. Do you remember the obscurity of Mozart's son? An amiable man, a clever musician, an excellent player, but hopelessly extinguished by his fathers reputation.
How could any man do what was expected from Mozart's son? Not Mozart himself even. Mozart's legacy is astounding. A master of every form in which he worked, he set standards of excellence that have inspired generations of composers. His musical manuscripts can be divided into three classes: sketches, unfinished compositions or fragments, and final autographs. Some of his representative works are Symphonies Nos. 25, 29, 38, 39, 40 41, the Jupiter Piano Concertos Nos. 19, 20 &# 038; 27 Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola String Quartets: The Hunt, The Dissonance String Quintet No. 4 in G minor, and K 516, Le Nozze di Figaro.
Mozart had an unsuccessful career and died young, but he ranks as one of the great geniuses of Western civilization. His large output (more than 600 works) shows that even as a child he possessed a thorough command of the technical resources of musical composition as well as an original imagination. His musical style and influences will be around for many years to come. Endnotes H. C.
Robbins Landon, Mozart: The Golden Years (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), 14. Peter Gay, Mozart (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 3. H. C. Robbins Landon, Mozart: The Golden Years (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), 26.
Ibid. , 44. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. , 1986), 38. Peter Gay, Mozart (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 52. Erich Hertzmann, The Creative World of Mozart (New York: W.
W. Norton &# 038; Company, Inc. , 1963), 25. H. C.
Robbins Landon, Mozart: The Golden Years (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), 99. Ibid. , 137. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. , 1986), 11. Peter Gay, Mozart (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 32. H.
C. Robbins Landon, Mozart: The Golden Years (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), 176. Erich Hertzmann, The Creative World of Mozart (New York: W. W. Norton &# 038; Company, Inc. , 1963), 77. Ibid. , 20.
Bibliography Bath, Karl Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. , 1986. Gay, Peter Mozart. New York: Penguin Books. , 1999. Hertzmann, Erich The Creative World of Mozart.
New York: W. W. Norton &# 038; Company, Inc. , 1963. Landon, H.
C. Robbins Mozart and the Masons: New Light on the Lodge Crowned hope, London and New York, 1982. Landon, H. C. Robbins Mozart: The Golden Years.
New York: Schirmer Books. , 1989. WWW. Mozart. COM
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