With more than 600 compositions, including sonatas, operas, symphonies, and concertos for different instruments, he was a musician who, despite having died at only 35 years of age, demonstrated his ingenuity and skill in composing from an early age. And therefore, he is considered by experts as the best composer in history.
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He was born in Salzburg, Austria on January 27, 1756, and was the youngest of seven siblings, five of whom died in infancy. Along with him, his sister Maria Anna Mozart survived, at the age of 7 began to take keyboard lessons with her father, while Mozart, at only three years old, watching them. Sometime later, Leopold, his father, was stunned to see his four-year-old son read the notes without difficulty and play minuets with incredible ease. At the age of four, Mozart was already repeating on the keyboard the melodies that he had liked in church, predicting the musician he would become and his indisputable attraction to music.
The Mozart brothers became children’s concert performers, they journeyed to Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands. In 1762, a year after Mozart’s first written composition, these boys were giving concerts in the salons of Munich and Vienna. In the same year, they travelled to Frankfurt, Liège, Brussels and Paris. In London, they met Johann Christian Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach from whom Mozart took his style and composed personal versions of his music just six weeks after their meeting. During his tours, Mozart met many famous musicians and teachers who taught him different aspects of his art and new foreign techniques.
At the age of fifteen, Mozart had already written more than a hundred compositions including concertos, symphonies, masses, motets and operas, and had been awarded the Order of the Golden Spur with the title of knight by Pope Clement XIV.
Before and during Mozart‘s time, it was believed that music had to follow stricter rules, with the goal of achieving clarity and simplicity. Polyphony with one or more melodic parts was the norm, with arrangements that made them result in very complex pieces. Mozart composed pieces that pushed the instruments of his time to the limit, such as the Horn Concerto, where he took the musical evolution of his time and incorporated it into his work in an extraordinary way. Homophony, a single melodic line with accompaniment was brought by Mozart to his maximum expression.
Mozart fell ill after a trip he made to Prague, and it is not certain what caused his death. When he passed away, he was composing his last work called Requiem, which he left unfinished.
Compositions by Mozart
The Best of Mozart, HALIDONMUSIC, 2013
His legacy is made up of more than 620 pieces, including 21 operas, 15 masses, more than 50 symphonies, 25 piano concertos, 12 violin concertos, 27 arias, 17 piano sonatas, and 26 string quartets, among others. His innovative music has served as an inspiration to the musicians who have followed him, which is why he has been considered the best composer in musical history.
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5 Facts… you may not know about Mozart
- His full name is Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart and in his family, they called him Wolferl he started his musical career when he was 5 years old with a piano concerto difficult to interpret even for professional pianists.
- Mozart suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, a nervous disorder that causes restlessness and compulsive behaviours.
- For Mozart the number 3 had a special meaning and he included this number in many of his works. In The Magic Flute, for example, there are 3 major chords in the overture, three fairies, three children who guide the protagonist, three magical instruments, three tests, and three temples.
- Mozart wrote 621 works that he scrupulously put on paper, almost without erasures or amendments. It is estimated that copying his entire work by spending 10 hours a day would take 25 years. Something incredible if we consider that Mozart only lived 35 years.
- The reasons for Mozart‘s death are today a mystery, there are some 150 hypotheses about his death, one of the most widespread being the hypothesis of his poisoning, due to envy, by the composer Antonio Salieri.
