Wolfgang AmadeusMozart

When Leopold Mozart arrived in Vienna on 11 February 1785, the copyist was still writing out his son’s new concerto for that evening’s concert at the Mehlgrube. Wolfgang had been so busy supervising the copying that he had found no time to play the finale through. The work was K. 466 in D minor. It opens with syncopated strings, and the piano enters with a tune of its own. Leopold thought the concert excellent.

The next day, Haydn heard three quartets at Wolfgang’s home. Leopold recorded his verdict in a letter to Nannerl begun on 14 February: “Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer I know, personally or by name.” Haydn praised his taste and his knowledge of composition. Mozart later dedicated the quartets to him.

On the roadThe Mozart family tours, 1763–⁠66

Wolfgang was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756, the seventh child of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl. Only he and his elder sister Maria Anna survived infancy. Leopold served the archbishop as a violinist and published his violin treatise in the year of Wolfgang’s birth. He taught both children. Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, was an accomplished keyboard player; the early tours advertised the brother and sister together.

The family spent much of 1763–⁠66 travelling through German courts, Paris, London and the Netherlands. Leopold arranged engagements, kept the accounts and supervised lessons; illness interrupted the tour. In London Wolfgang met Johann Christian Bach and heard the Italianate singing style found in Bach’s keyboard music and operas.

Salzburg and ItalyItalian operas and Salzburg concertos

Three Italian visits with Leopold, between 1769 and 1773, brought commissions for the theatre. Milan heard Mitridate, re di Ponto in 1770 and Lucio Silla in 1772. Mozart learnt to fit his arias to a singer’s range and breath.

In 1777 he left with his mother to look for a better appointment. At Mannheim he heard the famous orchestra and fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber. Paris offered work but no secure position. His mother died there in July 1778. Back in Salzburg in 1779, he became court organist; a Munich commission later took him into another theatre. Idomeneo, first performed in 1781, concerns a father’s vow and the threatened death of his son, and the chorus takes part in the catastrophe.

ViennaDie Entführung aus dem Serail

A quarrel with Colloredo ended his Salzburg employment in 1781. Mozart settled in Vienna, where he earned money from pupils, concerts, publishers and commissions and cultivated patrons. In 1782 he married Constanze Weber, Aloysia’s younger sister. They had six children; two sons survived infancy. His letters moved between household business and the work on his desk with very little ceremony.

Writing to Leopold on 13 October 1781 about Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he set out a rule: “In an opera, poetry must simply be music’s obedient daughter.” He was arguing for words that would work in the theatre, and was discussing revisions with his librettist, Gottlieb Stephanie. The opera opened in Vienna in 1782. It combines spoken German with Konstanze’s taxing arias, Osmin’s comic bass role and the loud percussion of the “Turkish” band.

At the pianoPiano concertos, mid-1780s

Mozart’s subscription concerts of the mid-1780s needed new concertos. In K. 466 the piano’s first theme follows the orchestral opening and differs from it. In the A major Concerto K. 488, clarinets replace the oboes. The slow movement is in F♯ minor, and the piano plays a melody in a halting dance rhythm. In the finale, flute and bassoon play an E major melody together.

Da PonteThe three Da Ponte operas

Lorenzo Da Ponte supplied Le nozze di Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787 and Così fan tutte in 1790. In Figaro, drawn from Beaumarchais, the Count pursues his servant Susanna while his wife and servants plot to thwart him. In the Act II finale new characters keep entering a domestic quarrel, and each arrival changes what the others can believe. Mozart changes tempo and key as the situation changes, and the finale runs continuously without recitative.

Prague’s enthusiasm for Figaro brought the commission for Don Giovanni. At Giovanni’s party, three bands play three dances in different metres while the host tries to get Zerlina alone. Later the murdered Commendatore comes to supper as a statue, and with him come trombones and the D minor of the overture. Mozart revised the opera for Vienna in 1788, writing three new numbers for it. In the Prague original, the opera continues after Giovanni goes to hell, with the surviving characters arranging their lives.

In Così, two men test their fiancées by courting them in disguise. The men set out to prove a proposition about the women’s constancy, and the women go through the feelings that the test produces.

The last yearsLast symphonies, 1791 and the Requiem

Money became harder to find in the later 1780s. Mozart asked his fellow Freemason Michael Puchberg for loans. In the summer of 1788 he completed his final three symphonies within weeks: E♭ major, G minor and C major. The last ends by bringing five themes together. He later returned to the G minor score to add clarinets and rewrite the oboe parts.

On 13 October he collected Salieri and the soprano Caterina Cavalieri in a carriage and took them to The Magic Flute. Writing to Constanze the next day, he reported that Salieri followed the opera attentively from the overture to the final chorus, and that scarcely a number passed without “bravo” or “bello”. His seven-year-old son Carl was there too.

He died on 5 December 1791, aged thirty-five, leaving the Requiem unfinished. Count Franz von Walsegg had commissioned it anonymously in memory of his wife. Constanze arranged its completion; Franz Xaver Süssmayr supplied the version that became standard. Mozart was buried in a common grave at St Marx, according to Viennese practice.