Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 in Salzburg and died on 5 December 1791 in Vienna; he was an Austrian composer, widely recognized as one of the greatest in the history of Western music.¹ The house of his birth, at Getreidegasse 9, is now Mozart's Birthplace — one of the most visited museums in the world.² A three-story exhibition there covers his family, his musical beginnings, his friends and patrons, and his passion for opera.²

His father was Leopold Mozart, a talented violinist who became deputy Kapellmeister at the prince-archbishop's court at Salzburg and wrote a famous violin-playing manual, published in the very year of Wolfgang's birth.¹ His mother was Anna Maria Pertl.¹ Wolfgang and his sister Maria Anna — known in the family as Nannerl — were the only two of their seven children to survive; she was, like her brother, highly talented.¹

He was baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.¹ In its fuller Latin form the name is given as Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.¹ The International Mozarteum Foundation, the body that maintains the Mozart museums, today uses the form Wolfgang Amadé Mozart.³

Mozart was a child prodigy.¹ His father, a talented violinist, taught him basic notes on the harpsichord.¹ Mozart composed his first piece of music in 1761, at the age of five; by age six, he had performed before two imperial courts.¹ Just before he was six, his father took him and Nannerl to Munich, and a few months later to Vienna, where they were heard at the imperial court and in noble houses.¹

In mid-1763 Leopold obtained a leave of absence from his post as deputy Kapellmeister at the prince-archbishop's court, and the family set out on a prolonged tour.¹ It took in the main musical centres of western Europe, including Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Mainz, Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris, then London, where they spent 15 months.¹ They returned through The Hague, Amsterdam, Lyon and Switzerland to Salzburg in November 1766.¹ In Paris Mozart published his first piece of music.¹

In London the Mozarts met, among others, Johann Christian Bach — Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son and a leading figure in the city's musical life.¹ Under his influence Mozart composed his first symphonies.¹ Three survive: K 16, K 19 and K 19a — the K marking the work's place in the catalogue of Ludwig von Köchel.¹

In 1769, 13-year-old Mozart was appointed honorary Konzertmeister at the Salzburg court.¹ The first Italian tour, begun on 13 December 1769, lasted 15 months and took him and his father to all the main musical centres.¹ In Verona he was put through stringent tests at the Accademia Filarmonica, and in Milan, after tests of his capacities in dramatic music, he was commissioned to write the first opera for the carnival season.¹

In Rome during Holy Week Mozart heard the Sistine Choir sing the famous Miserere of Gregorio Allegri, which was considered the choir's exclusive preserve.¹ He copied it out from memory.¹ Returning through Rome, he had a papal audience and was made a knight of the order of the Golden Spur.¹

Mitridate, rè di Ponto premiered at the Regio Ducal Teatro in Milan on 26 December and was a notable success; Mozart directed the first three of the 22 performances.¹ Lucio Silla was given on 26 December 1772; after a difficult premiere — it began three hours late and lasted six — it proved even more successful, with 26 performances.¹ Mozart followed it with the solo motet Exsultate, jubilate (K 165), written for its leading singer, the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini.¹

By 1774 Mozart was a salaried court Konzertmeister at Salzburg.¹ In 1777 he petitioned the archbishop for his release and, with his mother to watch over him, set out to find new opportunities.¹ By mid-June 1778 his mother was seriously ill, and on 3 July she died.¹

Archbishop Colloredo, a progressive churchman, discouraged lavish music and set a severe time limit on mass settings.¹ Mozart objected to the restriction but was obliged to observe it.¹ Matters came to a head at an interview with the archbishop, who, according to Mozart, used unecclesiastical language.¹

Mozart requested his discharge; it was eventually granted at a stormy meeting with the court steward on 9 June 1781.¹ He settled in Vienna, where he soon lodged with the Weber family.¹ In the summer of 1781 rumours reached Salzburg that he was contemplating marriage with Constanze, the third of the Weber daughters.¹ By December he was asking his father's blessing on the marriage.¹

His German opera for Joseph II's court theatre, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, reached the Burgtheater stage on 16 July 1782.¹ It enjoyed immediate and continuing success and carried his reputation widely around the German-speaking countries.¹ The opera was quickly taken up by travelling and provincial companies.¹

In February 1784 Mozart began to keep a catalogue of his own music — which Britannica reads as a new awareness of posterity and his place in it; his entries are sometimes misdated.¹ He kept it until 1791; the manuscript, in German, is today held by the British Library.⁶ The library records its shelfmark as Zweig MS 63, with usage terms Public Domain.⁶

The catalogue served as a musical diary, carried on his travels; he noted instrumentation, movements, dedicatees, performers and performance dates.⁶ Each entry occupies two facing pages — the completion date and title on the left, the opening bars of the music on the right.⁶ The first entry is the Piano Concerto in E flat (K 449); among the last, The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito — the latter written for the coronation of the Emperor Leopold II.⁶

What began in 1862 as Ludwig von Köchel's original chronological and thematic catalogue of Mozart's compositions is now available in an updated online version.⁷ It was the first thematic scholarly catalogue of a major composer's oeuvre, and the model for most thematic catalogues since.⁸ Its numbering covered 626 works, ending with the unfinished Requiem.⁸ The September 2024 edition, the first since 1964, returns to the earliest number each authentic work ever had, so that 95 new numbers could be assigned, starting from KV 627.⁷⁸

Mozart wrote in all the musical genres of his day and excelled in every one; with Haydn and Beethoven he brought to its height the achievement of the Viennese Classical school.¹ In all he composed more than 600 pieces of music.¹ The works below are those the sources document individually, from the first entry in his own catalogue to the Requiem left unfinished at his death.⁶¹

In one spell of little more than five weeks Mozart appeared at 22 concerts, mainly at the Esterházy and Galitzin houses but including five concerts of his own.¹ The piano concertos were the central products of his concert activity.¹ In 1782-83 he wrote three of them (K 413-415), published in 1785 with string and optional wind parts for domestic use, and described by Mozart as a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult.¹

The six string quartets on which he had embarked in 1782 were finished in the first days of 1785.¹ Published later that year, they were dedicated to Haydn, by then a friend of Mozart's.¹ In 1785 Haydn said to Leopold Mozart, on a visit to his son in Vienna: Your son is the greatest composer known to me in person or by name; he has taste, and what is more the greatest knowledge of composition.¹

Figaro, on a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, reached the stage on 1 May 1786 and was warmly received: nine performances that year, and 26 more in the 1789-90 revival.¹ Its outstanding popularity in Prague brought an invitation to the Bohemian capital in January 1787, when he gave a new symphony there — the Prague (K 504).¹ From these years come Eine kleine Nachtmusik, probably intended for solo strings, and the Musical Joke, a good-humoured parody of bad music.¹ Leopold died in May 1787; Mozart, a Freemason since the end of 1784, had written him a letter of consolation setting out a view of death based on Masonic teachings.¹

Don Giovanni, commissioned for Prague, was given on 29 October 1787 and warmly received.¹ On his return from Prague in mid-November 1787, Mozart was at last appointed to a court post, as Kammermusicus, in place of Gluck.¹ Largely a sinecure, it required dance music for court balls; the salary of 800 gulden did little to relieve the Mozarts' chronic financial troubles.¹ In 1788 began a series of letters begging loans from a fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg, who usually obliged and was generally repaid promptly.¹ In the same period he worked on three symphonies — E flat (K 543), G minor (K 550) and C major (the Jupiter, K 551) — the summa of his orchestral output with the Prague Symphony.¹

In 1791 music was flowing again: for a concert in March Mozart completed a piano concerto (K 595) begun some years before.¹ He reeled off numerous dances for the Redoutensaal and wrote two new string quintets, the one in D (K 593) being a work of particular refinement and subtlety.¹ In April he applied successfully for the role of unpaid assistant to the elderly Kapellmeister of St. Stephen's Cathedral.¹

Two commissions arrived that year: one, anonymously delivered, for a requiem, to be composed under conditions of secrecy.¹ The other, probably in July, was an invitation to write the opera for Leopold II's coronation festivities in September.¹ That opera was La clemenza di Tito, for which Mozart took to Prague his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who almost certainly composed its plain recitatives.¹ In July Constanze gave birth to their sixth child, one of the two who survived.¹

Mozart's clarinet concerto was finished by 29 September 1791, and the next day Die Zauberflöte had its premiere at the Theater auf der Wieden near Vienna.¹ The opera, a singspiel in two acts with a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, was Mozart's last.⁹ Early reactions were cautious, but it soon became the most loved of all his works for the stage.¹ It is an allegory of the quest for wisdom and enlightenment through symbols of Freemasonry; Mozart and Schikaneder were both Freemasons.⁹ Its most obvious Masonic symbol is the number three — three boys, three ladies and three slaves among the cast, three chords in the music.⁹

Freemasonry ran through the final years: Mozart was received into the Vienna lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit on 14 December 1784, and in April 1785 he brought his father Leopold into the Wahre Eintracht as well.¹⁰ In November 1791 he wrote a Masonic cantata for his lodge and directed a performance of it on 18 November.¹ Later that month he was ill and confined to bed; the apparent improvement on 3 December was not sustained, and on 5 December he died.¹

Severe miliary fever was the certified cause of death; later, rheumatic inflammatory fever was named, and other diagnoses including Schönlein-Henoch syndrome have been put forward.¹ Suggested causes have ranged from poisoning and renal failure to trichinosis.¹¹ The 2009 study in Annals of Internal Medicine analysed 5,011 adult deaths (3,442 men, 1,569 women) recorded in Mozart's Vienna in November-December 1791 and January 1792 and the matching periods in 1790-91 and 1792-93.¹¹ Its analysis is consistent with the last illness being due to a streptococcal infection leading to an acute nephritic syndrome caused by poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis.¹¹

He was buried in a multiple grave, standard at the time in Vienna for a person of his social and financial situation.¹ A small group of friends attended the funeral.¹ What the record does not show is destitution: the household's debts were never large, and it continued to employ servants and keep a carriage.¹

Constanze Mozart was anxious to have the requiem completed, as a fee was due.¹ She handed it first to Joseph Eybler, who supplied some orchestration but was reluctant to do more, and then to Süssmayr, who produced a complete version, writing several movements himself.¹ The completion has been criticised for egregious technical and expressive weaknesses, particularly in the Sanctus/Benedictus, yet it has remained the standard version of the work.¹

Britannica finds little evidence for Salieri's supposed intrigues and damaging remarks against Mozart.¹² Mozart himself commented in a letter on Salieri's favourable reception of The Magic Flute.¹² There is no foundation for the belief that Salieri tried to poison Mozart — a legend that was the basis of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart et Salieri of 1898, itself based on Pushkin's short story of 1830.¹²

Salieri was an Italian composer whose operas were acclaimed throughout Europe; the emperor made him court composer, and in 1788 he became Hofkapellmeister, a position he held for 36 years.¹² Mozart knew that the Italian musical influence at court under the Kapellmeister was powerful and exclusive — even if he and Salieri were never on less than friendly terms personally.¹ There is no evidence, Britannica states plainly, to support the tale that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri — a colleague and friend, hardly a real rival — or anyone else.¹

The relationship received further speculative treatment in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1980, filmed 1984).¹² The play, its 1984 film directed by Miloš Forman, and the 2025 Netflix miniseries reinforced certain myths: Mozart as an inappropriately childish vessel for divinely inspired music, and his death as Salieri's doing.¹ The film was a largely fictionalized account of the two men's relationship and won eight Academy Awards, among them best picture.¹³ Britannica's own film article states the record plainly: the bitter rivalry was fictional, in real life they were apparently friendly, and the Requiem was anonymously commissioned — but not by Salieri.¹³

The record below is in their voices: Haydn's tribute of 1785, Mozart's own letters, his widow's certificate, and an eyewitness description from June 1765.¹⁵²

Today Mozart is widely considered one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.¹ With Haydn and Beethoven he brought to its height the achievement of the Viennese Classical school.¹ Unlike any other composer in musical history, he wrote in all the musical genres of his day and excelled in every one.¹

The institutional trail is correspondingly rich: the Library of Congress holds more than 10,000 Mozart items, from manuscripts and first editions to scores, letters and iconography.⁵ Its cornerstone is 12 autograph music manuscripts spanning his creative life, with three non-musical autographs including letters to Nannerl and Leopold.⁵ The Library also holds the joint diary fragment of 24 May 1780, verified by Mozart's widow in Salzburg in 1829.¹⁴ In Vienna, the Austrian National Library's Department of Music keeps Mozart's Requiem among its original manuscripts, alongside Haydn's Kaiserhymne and Beethoven's violin concerto.¹⁵ The Digital Mozart Edition takes as its reference text the New Mozart Edition, accessible online as the NMA since 2005.¹⁶

In 1996 UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of the City of Salzburg on the World Heritage List under criteria (ii), (iv) and (vi), describing the city as intimately associated with many important artists and musicians, preeminent among them Mozart.¹⁷ Approximately 80 Mozart associations worldwide share the goal of cultivating his musical heritage.⁴ The clavichord whose certificate is in Constanze's hand entered the Mozarteum Foundation's collection in 1844 and formed the basis of its collection of original Mozart instruments.²