Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Youthful Talent

Mozart was a child prodigy, performing with great accomplishment on the keyboard and violin. His talents were cultivated by his father Leopold, a professional violinist in the employ of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, who took Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl on a series of musical tours around Europe’s royal courts, including Munich, Paris, Amsterdam and London. Mozart also began composing early, writing his first symphony at the age of eight and his first full-length opera as a young teenager. Over the course of his life, Mozart’s compositional output was vast, despite the fact that his career was cut short: he died aged only 35.

Career Development

Mozart found employment with the Salzburg court but craved wider horizons. He sought a post at the Imperial court in Vienna – the city which he made his home – but was never successful in gaining the security or formal recognition he desired. An early example of a musical freelancer, he earned his living by teaching, performing as a soloist in his own piano concertos, writing to commission and publishing. Mozart earned reasonable sums but struggled to manage his money due to a lavish lifestyle and running up debts. His works were in demand far beyond Vienna: Don Giovanni and the Symphony No 38, for example, were written for Prague.

Mozart the Thinker

Mozart subscribed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, an 18th-century philosophical movement based around the concept of freedom, which argued that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition and tyranny. His opera The Magic Flute, about a prince who embarks upon a quest for self-knowledge, is an allegory for Enlightenment values, which constantly sets up oppositions between day/night, knowledge/ignorance and good/evil. Mozart, like his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, was a committed Freemason, and the opera also makes reference to that movement in its representation of initiation trials and its use of keys and instruments with coded masonic associations.

Classical Style

Mozart pioneered the Classical style in music, which – like architecture of the same era – prioritised logic, clarity and symmetry. Sonata form, the organisational structure that underpins movements of Classical sonatas, symphonies, quartets and even operatic scenes, is itself symmetrical in the way it returns to the opening theme. Mozart’s works are typically lighter in texture than those of earlier composers, characterised by elegant melodies in balanced phrases. Although he retained a profound admiration for J S Bach and George Frideric Handel, he largely avoided complex harmonies favoured during the Baroque era, employing them only for judicious dramatic effect.

When visiting London in the 1760s, the Mozart family crossed paths with Johann Christian Bach, a son of Johann Sebastian. J C Bach became a key influence on the young Mozart, impressing him with his use of graceful, lyrical melodies. Mozart was also a great admirer of his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel (C P E) Bach, a key exponent of the ‘Empfindsamkeit’, a style that prioritised sensitivity and ‘natural’ emotions. As a child, Mozart watched Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste in Vienna and absorbed aspects of the composer’s operatic reforms, which sought to simplify opera, emphasising drama over musical embellishment for its own sake. Another operatic composer who inspired Mozart was the Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello, whose opera The Barber of Seville laid down a template for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.