Mozart (1756-1791) composed 626 works in 35 years of a perfection that remains the most inexplicable phenomenon in music history.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the son of Leopold Mozart, a respected violinist and composer in the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. From the earliest age, the child demonstrated a capacity for music so far beyond ordinary talent that contemporaries struggled to explain it in natural terms. By age four he was picking out harmonies at the keyboard; by five he had composed his first pieces. Leopold, recognizing what he possessed, withdrew from his own career to become his son's manager, teacher, and impresario. Between 1762 and 1773, the Mozart family undertook an almost continuous series of tours across Europe: Vienna, Munich, Paris, London, Rome, Milan, Naples. Young Wolfgang performed at the courts of Louis XV, George III, and Maria Theresa, was made a Knight of the Golden Spur by Pope Clement XIV, and absorbed the styles of every major composer active in Europe — Johann Christian Bach in London, Giovanni Battista Sammartini in Milan, and later Joseph Haydn, whom he came to know in Vienna. By the time Mozart reached his mid-teens, he had heard and internalized more music in more styles than any other composer of his era, and had already written symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, and operatic works of astonishing accomplishment.
The decisive break came in 1781 when Mozart, then employed as court musician to Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo of Salzburg, was literally dismissed with a kick from the Archbishop's steward and found himself free and unemployed in Vienna. He chose to remain, attempting to build a career as an independent composer and performer — a genuinely novel and precarious undertaking in an era when musicians depended entirely on aristocratic or ecclesiastical patronage. For a few years, the gamble appeared to succeed magnificently. The Vienna piano concertos of 1784 to 1786 — K.453, K.459, K.466, K.467, K.482, K.488, K.491 — represent perhaps the highest sustained achievement in the concerto form, each one finding new solutions to the problem of balancing solo brilliance with orchestral argument. His subscription concerts were sold out, his piano playing was celebrated as unrivaled in Europe, and commissions arrived from every direction. The opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) was a popular triumph, and Mozart married Constanze Weber despite his father's objections, establishing his own household and his independence from Leopold's control.
The operatic trilogy created with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte — Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790) — constitutes the summit of comic opera and one of the supreme achievements in all of Western music. Figaro transforms Beaumarchais' politically subversive play about class conflict into something simultaneously more and less radical: the music grants every character, from Count Almaviva to his valet Figaro to the Countess, an interior life of equal depth and complexity, making the social satire cut deeper than any spoken comedy could. Don Giovanni unites comedy and supernatural terror in a single evening, ending not with conventional moral resolution but with the defiant libertine dragged to hell — a conclusion whose moral ambiguity troubled audiences and has generated philosophical commentary ever since. Così fan tutte, the most formally perfect of the three, presents a cynical symmetry about human desire that many found offensive and that the 19th century preferred to ignore, only for the 20th century to recognize as one of the most sophisticated psychological studies in musical theatre. Alongside these operas, Mozart was producing the late symphonies — the E-flat, G minor, and C major (Jupiter) of 1788, written in a six-week burst that produced three of the half-dozen greatest symphonies in the repertoire.
By 1790, the picture had darkened considerably. Fashion in Vienna had turned toward lighter Italian opera, subscription concerts had become impossible to fill, and Mozart found himself in chronic financial distress, writing desperate letters to his Masonic brother Michael Puchberg begging for loans. His health, never robust, was deteriorating. In 1791 he accepted a commission from an anonymous stranger — later identified as Count Franz von Walsegg, who intended to pass the work off as his own — for a Requiem Mass. The mythology that grew up around this commission, amplified enormously by Peter Shaffer's play and Milos Forman's 1984 film Amadeus, presents Mozart as haunted by premonitions of his own death while composing a mass for the dead. The historical reality is more prosaic but no less poignant: Mozart was working on multiple commissions simultaneously in 1791, including the comic opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), which premiered successfully in September, and the opera seria La clemenza di Tito. He died on December 5, 1791, aged 35, leaving the Requiem unfinished. The cause remains disputed — rheumatic fever, kidney disease, and typhus have all been proposed. His student Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the Requiem from Mozart's sketches. He was buried, according to the custom of the time for middle-class Viennese citizens, in a communal grave; the specific location was not recorded. The legend that he died in poverty and was buried anonymously has been substantially overstated by romantic biography, but the reality — that the greatest musical genius in European history died at 35, exhausted and financially strained — remains sufficiently extraordinary. The 626 works catalogued by Ludwig von Köchel in 1862 include masterpieces in virtually every genre available to an eighteenth-century composer: opera, symphony, concerto, string quartet, piano sonata, Mass, and chamber music. How he created so much, at such consistent quality, in so short a time, remains the most compelling and unresolved question in music history.