Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was four years old when his father began teaching him minuets at the clavier, treating it as a game. The boy played them faultlessly, in perfect time, with delicacy. By five he was composing little pieces and playing them for his father, who wrote them down. He had already performed before European royalty. His father, Leopold, called him the miracle whom God allowed to be born in Salzburg. Over a life of just thirty-five years, Mozart completed more than 800 works. He died with his Requiem largely unfinished, on a calm and mild December night in Vienna, in 1791. He was interred in a common grave at the St. Marx Cemetery, and possibly no mourners attended. How does a court servant dismissed with a kick from a steward become an archetype of an entire era of music? What did he ask for in his final hours? And why do biographers, all working from the same letters and manuscripts, still argue over who he really was?

• 2. The Sources Disagree

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  About 1500 pages of family letters survive, often vivid and entertaining, mostly written when travel separated Mozart from his kin. Early biographies drew on input from his sister Nannerl, his wife Constanze, and others who knew him well. Old newspaper stories and government records have been located in archives, annotated, and published. The composer's surviving manuscripts include sketches, drafts, dated autographs, and his own personal catalog. Biographers all work from these same materials, yet they often disagree on crucial points. Part of the trouble is judging how far to trust a source with a motive to bend the truth. The publisher Friedrich Rochlitz, once widely used, is now judged untruthful; he published false, vivid stories about Mozart to boost posthumous sales of his works. Over time, biographers have grown less credulous toward such tales, less sentimental, and more attentive to Mozart's own society. The same caution shapes how scholars treat the famous account of the boy in Rome, who heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in the Sistine Chapel and wrote it out from memory. Leopold reported it in a letter home, but the details are disputed.

• 3. A Child On The Road

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  Getreidegasse 9 in Salzburg was where Mozart was born on the 27th of January 1756, the youngest of seven children, five of whom died in infancy. His father Leopold, a native of Augsburg and a minor composer, had published a successful violin textbook in the very year of his son's birth. Leopold was the children's only teacher, instructing them in languages and academic subjects alongside music. Nannerl, his elder sister, later recalled how the three-year-old boy spent much time at the clavier, striking thirds and delighting that they sounded good. His first ink-spattered composition and his early efforts with the violin came on his own initiative and surprised his father. Leopold eventually gave up composing once his son's gifts became clear. An exhibition in 1762 at the court of Maximilian III of Bavaria in Munich opened a long concert tour, three and a half years through Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht, and back home. In London, the boy met Johann Christian Bach in 1764 and 1765, an influence that shaped him. Travel conditions were primitive. The family waited on the nobility for invitations and reimbursement, and endured near-fatal illnesses far from home: Leopold in London in the summer of 1764, then both children at The Hague in the autumn of 1765. Three trips to Italy followed, where Wolfgang wrote operas and, in Bologna, was accepted into the famous Accademia Filarmonica.

• 4. Restless In Salzburg

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  On the 13th of March 1773, Mozart returned from Italy and took up work as a court musician under the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus Colloredo. He had friends and admirers there and a chance to write across many genres. He composed his only five violin concertos, one in 1773 and four in 1775, each more sophisticated than the last; the final three are staples of the modern repertoire. His salary was 150 florins a year, and he longed to compose operas, which Salzburg rarely allowed. The closure of the court theatre in 1775 made the situation worse. Two long expeditions in search of work broke up the Salzburg years, to Vienna and to Munich, where his opera La finta giardiniera scored a popular success. In August 1777 Mozart resigned and set out again, this time with his mother, through Munich, Augsburg, Mannheim, and Paris. In Augsburg he met his first cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, with whom he exchanged letters that have astonished and dismayed modern readers, mostly silly and scatological, full of mentions of what English translates as muck. In Mannheim he fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber. The journey's worst moment came in Paris, where his mother fell ill and died on the 3rd of July 1778, the doctor called late, probably for lack of funds. Mozart returned to Salzburg on the 15th of January 1779 to a new post as court organist, his discontent undiminished.

• 5. Breaking Free In Vienna

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  A kick in the arse, administered by the archbishop's steward Count Arco, ended Mozart's service to Colloredo in 1781. He had been summoned to Vienna, required to dine with the valets and cooks, and forbidden to perform outside his employer's establishment. One such ban cost him a fee equal to half his yearly Salzburg salary. He tried to resign in May and was refused; permission came the next month, in grossly insulting fashion. His father sided against him, urging reconciliation, and the two exchanged intense letters until the dismissal freed Mozart of both employer and paternal demand. The biographer Solomon calls the resignation a revolutionary step that altered the course of his life. Mozart settled in Vienna as a freelance performer and composer, and his new career began well. On the 24th of December 1781 he competed before the Emperor against Muzio Clementi, and he soon stood as the finest keyboard player in the city. His opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail premiered on the 16th of July 1782 to considerable success and was soon performed throughout German-speaking Europe. The Emperor would later support his career with commissions and a part-time post.

• 6. Constanze And The Police

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  A parlour game nearly broke the engagement: Constanze Weber had let another young man measure her calves, and a jealous Mozart briefly split from her in April 1782. He had moved in with the Weber family after his quarrels with Colloredo, his interest shifting from Aloysia, now married, to her third sister. Getting his father's permission for the marriage was a very difficult task. The wedding took place in an atmosphere of crisis. Writing to Baroness von Waldstatten on the 4th of August, Mozart asked whether the police could really enter a house in such a way, and wondered if it was only a ruse of Madame Weber to get her daughter back. He concluded he knew no better remedy than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning, or if possible today. The couple married that same day, the 4th of August 1782, in St. Stephen's Cathedral, one day before his father's consenting letter arrived. They had six children, of whom only two survived infancy: Karl Thomas, born in 1784, and Franz Xaver Wolfgang, born in 1791. The scholar Eisen judges the marriage basically happy, drawing on Mozart's letters to Constanze, generally affectionate, often funny, and occasionally erotic. In old age, Constanze described the marriage as completely happy.

• 7. Six Children For Haydn

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  I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute. Joseph Haydn said this to Leopold in 1785, at a gathering where three of Mozart's quartets were played. The two composers had become friends around 1784 and sometimes played chamber music together. Mozart dedicated six quartets to Haydn, written between 1782 and 1785, a response to Haydn's Opus 33 set. He sent them with a letter calling them his six children, entrusted to the protection and guidance of a famous man who was also his friend. From 1782 to 1785 Mozart mounted his own concerts as piano soloist, presenting three or four new concertos each season. With theatre space scarce, he booked unconventional venues, a large room in the Trattnerhof and the ballroom of the Mehlgrube restaurant. The concerts were very popular, and the concertos premiered there remain firm fixtures in the repertoire. The returns funded a luxurious life. He took an expensive apartment at 460 florins a year, bought a fortepiano from Anton Walter for about 900 florins and a billiard table for about 300, and sent Karl Thomas to a costly boarding school. On the 14th of December 1784 he became a Freemason, admitted to the lodge Zur Wohltatigkeit, and Freemasonry stayed essential to him for the rest of his life.

• 8. The Last Years

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  A 66 percent decline in income struck Mozart in 1788, measured against his best year of 1781. The Austro-Turkish War had brought economic decline; patrons could not afford ticket prices, and fewer could pay for commissions. He moved his family to the suburb of Alsergrund and began borrowing money, most often from his fellow mason Michael von Puchberg, leaving behind a pitiful sequence of letters pleading for loans. Solomon and others suggest he suffered from depression. Yet high points of his work continued: the last three symphonies, numbers 39, 40, and 41, all from the summer of 1788, and the last Da Ponte opera, Cosi fan tutte, premiered in 1790. His chamber-composer post, paying just 800 florins a year, required him only to write dances for the annual balls, but the modest income mattered when hard times came. In his final year, 1791, productivity was high and his finances finally began to improve. He composed Die Zauberflote, his last piano concerto, the Clarinet Concerto, and the unfinished Requiem. Mozart fell seriously ill on the 20th of November 1791, suffering swelling, pain, and vomiting, nursed by Constanze and her sister Sophie. By Sophie's account, he spent some of his final hours discussing with his student Sussmayr the problem of getting the Requiem completed. He died at home on the 5th of December 1791, at 12:55 in the morning. The official record listed hitziges Frieselfieber, a severe fever, but the cause is not known with certainty, and researchers have proposed more than a hundred possibilities. His student Johann Nepomuk Hummel, taken into the Mozart home for two years as a child, became his most famous pupil; Beethoven, his junior by fifteen years, was deeply influenced by his work.