Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer of the Classical era who wrote more than six hundred works in a life of under thirty-six years. A child prodigy paraded across Europe by his father, he became the leading freelance musician of Vienna, and his operas, symphonies, piano concertos and chamber music are among the most performed music in the world. With Joseph Haydn and the young Beethoven, he defined the Viennese Classical style.

Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, then the capital of an independent prince-archbishopric within the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Leopold Mozart, was a violinist in the archbishop's court orchestra and the author of a respected textbook on violin playing. Of his seven children only two survived infancy: Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, and Wolfgang, four and a half years younger.

Leopold taught both children, and Wolfgang's gifts showed astonishingly early. He was playing the keyboard at three and composing small pieces at five. Leopold, who gave up much of his own career to manage his son's, saw both a duty to show the world what he called a miracle and a chance to find the boy a rich patron.

From 1762 the family travelled almost constantly. In Vienna the six-year-old played before Empress Maria Theresa at Schönbrunn. A grand tour of 1763 to 1766 took them through the German courts to Paris and Versailles and on to London, where Wolfgang befriended Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose graceful style left a mark on his early symphonies. Three journeys to Italy between 1769 and 1773 followed. In Rome he is said to have written down from memory, after one hearing, Allegri's Miserere, a work the Sistine Chapel guarded closely, and the pope made him a knight of the Golden Spur. His opera Mitridate was staged in Milan in 1770, when he was fourteen.

These tours exposed him to every musical fashion in Europe, from Italian opera to French keyboard music and the German symphony. They also left him with health problems, and they never produced the court appointment Leopold hoped for.

Back home, Mozart served as a court musician under the new archbishop, Hieronymus Colloredo, who wanted a reliable servant and gave him little freedom. He wrote violin concertos, serenades, masses and symphonies, but felt stifled. A job-hunting journey to Mannheim and Paris in 1777 to 1779 failed, and his mother, who had travelled with him, died in Paris in July 1778. In Mannheim he fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber, who rejected him.

His opera Idomeneo, staged in Munich in January 1781, showed a new dramatic power. That spring Colloredo summoned him to Vienna, where Mozart chafed at being seated with the valets and forbidden to give his own concerts. After bitter quarrels he was dismissed in June 1781, literally kicked out of the room by the archbishop's steward, Count Arco. He stayed in Vienna, against his father's wishes.

In Vienna, Mozart lived as a freelance, teaching, publishing and giving concerts, an unusual and risky career for a musician of the time. In 1782 he married Constanze Weber, Aloysia's younger sister, and the same year his German comic opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) was a success at the court theatre of Emperor Joseph II. Through Baron Gottfried van Swieten he studied the fugues of Bach and Handel, which deepened his counterpoint.

Between 1784 and 1786 he was the city's most fashionable performer, playing his own piano concertos at subscription concerts. These concertos, about a dozen masterpieces in two years, turned the form into a dialogue between soloist and orchestra as rich as any drama. He became friends with Haydn, to whom he dedicated six string quartets, and in December 1784 he joined a Masonic lodge, remaining a committed Freemason for life.

His collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte produced three Italian operas that remain at the centre of the repertoire. Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), based on a play by Beaumarchais that had been banned for mocking aristocratic privilege, combines comedy with real feeling across class lines. Don Giovanni, written for Prague in 1787, where Mozart was adored, mixes farce with the supernatural punishment of a seducer. Così fan tutte (1790) is a cool, ambiguous comedy about fidelity. In these works Mozart used ensembles, in which several characters sing different thoughts at once, to move the plot and reveal character in ways no composer had before.

From 1788 Mozart's fortunes declined. War with the Ottoman Empire drained Viennese patronage, and he wrote many begging letters to a fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg. His expensive way of life played a part, though the old picture of a man dying in poverty is exaggerated. He held a modest court post as chamber composer from 1787, the year his father died. In the summer of 1788 he wrote his last three symphonies, Nos. 39, 40 and 41, the last later nicknamed the Jupiter, in about six weeks.

1791 was remarkably productive. He wrote La clemenza di Tito for the Prague coronation of Leopold II, the Clarinet Concerto, and Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a German-language fairy-tale opera full of Masonic symbolism, staged in September at Emanuel Schikaneder's suburban theatre to great popular success. He also began a Requiem, commissioned anonymously on behalf of Count Franz von Walsegg, who meant to pass it off as his own.

Mozart fell ill in November and died in Vienna on 5 December 1791, aged 35. The official cause was recorded as severe miliary fever, a description of symptoms rather than a diagnosis, and modern suggestions range from rheumatic fever to kidney failure. The rumour that his rival Antonio Salieri poisoned him has no basis, though it inspired Pushkin, Rimsky-Korsakov and the play and film Amadeus. He was buried in an ordinary grave in St Marx cemetery, according to Viennese custom of the time, not a pauper's grave as legend claims. His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the Requiem for Constanze, who skilfully managed her husband's legacy.

Mozart worked in every genre of his day and excelled in all of them. His music is admired for its clarity and balance, but also for the sudden darkness and emotional depth beneath its elegant surfaces, heard in works such as the G minor Symphony No. 40 and the D minor Piano Concerto. His operas made opera a medium for psychological truth, and his piano concertos set the model for those of Beethoven, who came to Vienna in 1787 hoping to study with him.

The nineteenth century turned him into a Romantic myth of the doomed, effortless genius, a picture that his letters, full of hard work, wit and vulgar jokes, complicate. In 1862 Ludwig von Köchel published a chronological catalogue of his works, and their K numbers are still used to identify them. Salzburg, which treated him poorly in life, now trades heavily on his name, and the Mozarteum Foundation there keeps his birthplace and a major research library. He remains, with Haydn, the central figure of the musical culture of the Habsburg Monarchy in the age of the Enlightenment, and a symbol of Austria itself.