Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SpNeo (talk | contribs) at 23:58, 19 October 2005 (consistent spelling). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 23:58, 19 October 2005 by SpNeo (talk | contribs) (consistent spelling)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) "Mozart" redirects here. For other uses, see Mozart (disambiguation).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) is among the most significant and enduringly popular composers of European classical music. His enormous output includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Many of his works are part of the standard concert repertory and are widely recognized as masterpieces of the classical style. Mozart himself is universally recognized as a musical genius, having learned to compose at the age of five and showing an encyclopedic grasp of every musical form of his time despite having lived only for 35 years.

Life

Family and early childhood years

Mozart was born in Salzburg, which is now in modern-day Austria but at the time was the capital of a small independent Archbishopric within the Holy Roman Empire, to his father Leopold, and his mother Anna Maria Pertl Mozart. He was baptized on the day after his birth at St. Rupert's Cathedral as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart but his name changed many times over the years.

Wolfgang's middle name, which is often embellished as "Amadeus", was almost never used by Mozart or his family. Braunbehrens makes it clear that the prevalent use of the name "Amadeus" has its origins in poor scholarship: "Mozart never called himself Amadeus but always used simply Amadé (or Amadeo), in an attempt to translate his baptismal name Theophilus (Gottlieb or "love of God")" (Braunbehrens 3).

Mozart's musical ability started to become apparent to his father when he was a mere toddler. He was the son of Leopold Mozart who was one of Europe's leading musical pedagogues, and whose influential textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule ("Essay on the fundamentals of violin playing") was published in 1756—the year of Mozart's birth. Mozart received intensive musical training from his father—including instruction in both the piano and violin. Musically, Mozart developed very rapidly and was already composing at the age of six.

The years of travel

Leopold realized that he could earn a substantial income by showcasing his son as a Wunderkind in the courts of Europe. Mozart soon gained fame as a musical prodigy capable of such feats as playing blindfolded or improvising wonderfully and at length on difficult passages he had never seen before. His older sister, Maria Anna, nicknamed "Nannerl", was a talented pianist and often accompanied her brother on Leopold's tours. Mozart wrote a number of piano pieces, in particular duets and duos, to play with her. On one occasion when Mozart became ill, Leopold expressed more concern over the loss of income than over his son's well-being. Constant travel and cold weather may have contributed to his subsequent illness later in life.

During his formative years, Mozart completed several journeys throughout Europe, beginning with an exhibition in 1762 at the Court of the Elector of Bavaria in Munich, then in the same year at the Imperial Court in Vienna. A long concert tour soon followed (three and a half years), which took him with his father to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zürich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. They went to Vienna again in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768.

Mozart's birthplace at 9 Getreidegasse, Salzburg, Austria

After one year spent in Salzburg, three trips to Italy followed: from December 1769 to March 1771, from August to December 1771, and from October 1772 to March 1773. During the first of these trips, Mozart met G.B. Martini in Bologna, and was accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica. A highlight of the Italian journey, which is now an almost legendary tale, occurred when he heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel, then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning a second time to correct minor errors: he thus produced the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican.

In September of 1777, accompanied only by his mother, Mozart began a tour of Europe that included Munich, Mannheim, and Paris, where his mother died.

During his trips, Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other great composers. A particularly important influence was Johann Christian Bach, who befriended Mozart as a child in London in 1764–65. JC Bach's work is often taken to be an inspiration for the distinctive surface texture of Mozart's music, though not its architecture or drama.

Even non-musicians caught Mozart's attention: he was so taken by the sound created by Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica that he composed several pieces of music for it.

Mozart in Vienna

In 1781 Mozart visited Vienna in the company of his employer, the harsh Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, and fell out with him. According to Mozart's own testimony, he was dismissed literally "with a kick in the seat of the pants." Mozart chose to settle and develop his career in Vienna after its aristocracy began to take an interest in him.

On August 4, 1782, he married Constanze Weber (also spelled "Costanze") against his father's wishes. He and Constanze had six children, of whom only two survived infancy. Neither of these two, Karl Thomas (1784–1858) or Franz Xaver Wolfgang (later a minor composer himself; 1791–1844), married or had children.

1782 was an auspicious year for Mozart's career; his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was a great success, and he began a series of concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos as conductor and soloist.

In 1782–83, Mozart became closely acquainted with the work of JS Bach and Handel, as a result of the influence of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who owned many manuscripts of works by the Baroque masters. Mozart's study of these works led, first, to a number of works of his own imitating Baroque style, and later had a powerful influence on his personal musical style, as seen for instance in the fugal passages in Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute") and the 41st Symphony.

At some unknown time during his early Vienna years, Mozart became personally acquainted with Joseph Haydn, and the two composers became friends. On occasions when Haydn was in Vienna, they sometimes played in an impromptu string quartet together. Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782–85, and are often judged to be his response to Haydn's Opus 33 set from 1781. Haydn himself was soon in awe of Mozart, and on the occasion he first heard the last three of Mozart's series he told Leopold, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition."

As an adult, Mozart, influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, became a Freemason, although his lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than deistic one, and worked fervently and successfully to convert his father before the latter's death in 1787. His last opera, Die Zauberflöte, includes Masonic themes and allegory. He was in the same Masonic Lodge as Haydn.

Mozart's life was fraught with financial difficulty and illness. Often, he received no payment for his work, and what sums he did receive were quickly consumed by his extravagant lifestyle.

Mozart spent the year 1786 in Vienna in an apartment which may be visited today at Domgasse 5 behind St Stephen's Cathedral; it was here that Mozart composed Le nozze di Figaro. He then followed this up in 1787 with one of his greatest works, Don Giovanni.

Mozart and Prague

Mozart had a special relationship with Prague and the people of Prague. The audience here celebrated their Figaro with the much deserved reverence he was missing in his hometown Vienna. His quote "My Czechs understand me" became very famous in the Czech lands. Many tourists follow the tracks of this great composer in Prague and visit the Mozart Museum of the Villa Bertramka where they have the opportunity to enjoy a chamber concert. In Prague, Don Giovanni was premiered and Prague provided Mozart, at the end of his life, with a lot of financial resources from the commissions.

Final illness and death

Mozart's final illness and death are difficult scholarly topics, obscured by Romantic legends and replete with conflicting theories. Scholars disagree about the course of decline in Mozart's health – particularly at what point Mozart became aware of his impending death, and whether this awareness influenced his final works. The Romantic view holds that Mozart declined gradually, and that his outlook and compositions paralleled this decline. In opposition to this, some contemporary scholarship points out correspondence from Mozart's final year indicating that he was in good cheer, as well as evidence that Mozart's death was sudden and a shock to his family and friends.

The actual cause of Mozart's death is also a matter of conjecture. His death record listed "hitziges Frieselfieber" ("severe miliary fever"), a description that does not suffice to identify the cause as it would be diagnosed in modern medicine. In fact, dozens of theories have been proposed, which include trichinosis, mercury poisoning, and rheumatic fever. The contemporary practice of bleeding medical patients is also cited as a contributing cause.

Mozart died around 1 am on December 5, 1791 while he was working on his final composition, the Requiem (unfinished when he died). A younger composer, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, was engaged by Konstanze to complete the Requiem after Mozart's death. He was not the only composer asked to complete the Requiem but he is associated with it over the others due to his significant contribution.

According to popular legend, Mozart was penniless and forgotten when he died, and was buried in a pauper's grave. In fact, though he was no longer as fashionable in Vienna as he had once been, he continued to have a well-paid job at court and receive substantial commissions from more distant parts of Europe, Prague in particular. Many of his begging letters survive, but they are evidence not so much of poverty as of his habit of spending more than he earned. He was not buried in a "mass grave", but in a regular communal grave according to the 1783 laws. Though the original grave on St. Marx cemetery was lost, memorial gravestones have been placed there and on Zentralfriedhof.

In 1809, Constanze married Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen (1761–1826). Being a fanatical admirer of Mozart, he edited vulgar passages out of many of the composer's letters and wrote a Mozart biography.

Works, musical style, and innovations

Main article: List of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart was the central representative of the classical style, and his works spanned the chronological period from the early, Italianate galant style of his teenage years to the mature classical style of his later life, which began to re-incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque. Mozart was a prolific composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintets, and the keyboard sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. Mozart also wrote a great deal of religious music including masses. He also composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment.

The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart's music. Clarity, balance, transparency, and uncomplicated harmonic language are his hallmark, although in his later works he explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. Mozart is routinely named along with Schubert as having the most dependable gift for pure, simple, and memorable melody of all the composers of the classical era.

From his earliest life Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he travelled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language. When he went to London as a child, he met JC Bach and heard his music; when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra; when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and the opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic and dominant, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are essentially Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are "homotonal" (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the tonic minor). Others mimic the works of JC Bach, and others show the simple, rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna.

As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of the abandoned Baroque styles into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201, uses a frankly contrapuntal main theme; in addition, in it he began to experiment with irregular phrase lengths, something a galant composer such as Sammartini would never have done. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had just published his opus 20 set; the influence of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers of the time.

In Mozarts's hands sonata form transformed from the binary models of the baroque into the fully mature form of his later works, with a multiple-theme exposition, extended, chromatic and contrapuntal development, recapitulation of all themes in the tonic key, and coda.

Throughout his life Mozart switched his focus from writing instrumental music to writing operas, and back again. He wrote operas in each style current in Europe: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo or Don Giovanni; and singspiel, of which the Magic Flute is probably the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas, he developed the use of subtle and slight changes of instrumentation, orchestration, and tone colour to express or highlight psychological or emotional states and dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted upon one another. The increasing sophistication of his use of the orchestra in his symphonies and concerti served as a resource in his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas reacted back upon his purely instrumental composition.

Influence

Many important composers since Mozart's time have worshipped or at least been in awe of Mozart. Rossini averred, "He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge." Beethoven told his pupil Ries that he (Beethoven) would never be able to think of a melody as great as a certain one in the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24. Beethoven also paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on several of his themes: for example, the two sets of variations for cello and piano on themes from Mozart's Magic Flute, and cadenzas to several of Mozart's piano concertos, most notably the Piano Concerto No. 20, K466 (see below for this system and an explanation). After the only meeting between the two composers, Mozart noted that Beethoven would "give the world something to talk about." As well, Tchaikovsky wrote his Mozartiana in praise of him; and Mahler died with the name "Mozart" on his lips. The variations theme of the opening movement of the A major piano sonata (K331) was used by Max Reger for his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, written in 1914 and among his best-known works in turn.

The Köchel catalogue

Main article: Köchel-Verzeichnis

In the decades following Mozart's death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel succeeded in this enterprise. Many of his famous works are referred to now by only their Köchel catalogue number; for example, the Piano Concerto in A major is often referred to simply as "K488" or "KV488". The catalogue has undergone six revisions since.

Myths and controversies

Mozart is unusual among composers for being the subject of an abundance of legend, much due to the problem that not one of his early biographers knew him personally and resorted to fiction in order to produce a work. Many of the myths that extend to our time began early after Mozart died, but almost none have any basis in fact. An example is the story that Mozart composed his Requiem with the belief it was for himself. Sorting out fabrications from real events is a vexing and continuous task for Mozart scholars mainly because of the prevalence of legend in scholarship. Dramatists and screenwriters, free from responsibilities of scholarship, have found excellent material among these legends.

An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and, in some versions, the tale that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart's death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart et Salieri, and Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. The last of these has been made into a feature-length film of the same name, which won eight Oscars. Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated.

One area of some debate involves Mozart's prodigy as a composer from childhood until his death. While he was indeed composing from the age of five, some musicologists have criticised many of his earlier works as being simplistic or forgettable; other critics however revere Mozart for his works from even his teenage years. On the other hand, the claim by the film Amadeus that Mozart would finish most works in his head and wrote them down uncorrected in only one draft, as if by divine inspiration, is generally believed to be an exaggeration. Quite the contrary, Mozart was a studiously hard worker, and by his own admission his extensive knowledge and intellect about music developed out of many years' close study of the European musical tradition. It was indicated in a letter to his father that he could write a piece finished in his head on paper while composing another at the same time.

Media

External links

Works by Mozart at Project Gutenberg
WAMozartFan.com The Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Educational Fanpage - resource for students, teachers and music lovers.
The Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"The last (and best) portrait of Mozart", a biometrical statistical confirmation that the recently identified painting by Edlinger from ca 1790 indeed shows Mozart
Free recordings of Vesperae de Dominica by the MIT choir
Mozart and pauses
The Mozart Project – the life, times and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart's Scores by Mutopia Project
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, from Classical Music Pages
The "Jenamy Concerto" The proper name of Mozart's piano concerto K. 271 revealed
Free Mozart piano sheet music in PDF format.
Mozart Forum Exploring the world of Classical-Era Music (1770-1827), encompassing the music, personalities and accomplishments of Mozart and his contemporaries.

Template:Lived

Categories:

Misplaced Pages