Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

views updated

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

1756–1791

Composer
Musician

Early Genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's father described him as "the miracle which God let be born in Salzburg." Leopold Mozart, a well-educated musician, devoted great energies to nurturing and promoting the talents of his son, whose musical genius manifested itself very early. Playing the harpsichord at the age of four and composing by the time he was five, Wolfgang quickly became a star attraction. His father took him on a three-year European performing tour, with his older sister Maria Anna that began when he was only seven. He excelled as an organist and violinist as well as at the harpsichord, and later would turn to the piano. The tour helped expose Mozart to the musical styles in all parts of Europe, and so aided the development of his own style as a composer. In 1764 at the age of eight, he performed before King Louis XV of France, and traveled with his father to London, where he composed his first symphonies, and published a set of violin sonatas. In London he also met Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. After the family's return to Salzburg in 1766, Mozart made several trips to Vienna where he met the composer Josef Haydn. His father also took him to Italy in 1770, both to perform and to study. They returned once again to Salzburg, where both father and son held positions at court. Young Mozart continued to compose and develop his reputation as a composer, but increasingly he felt constrained by the provincial atmosphere of Salzburg. He was unsuccessful, though, in winning a major position elsewhere, and so, he continued to make trips from Salzburg. Eventually, his requests for leave from his court position resulted in his dismissal, and in 1777 Mozart left on an extended tour of Germany and France with his mother. His mother died, though, not long after his arrival in Paris, and since Mozart was unsuccessful in securing a position in France, he returned again to Salzburg, where he once again received a contract from the Archbishop's court.

Vienna.

In 1781, after a stormy period in the employment of the archbishop, Mozart moved to Vienna to work independently as a freelance composer and performer. He found success quickly with the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. The work has a German text and is written in the Singspiel, meaning it includes both arias, duets, and ensemble work together with spoken dialogue. Here Mozart evoked its Turkish setting not only with sets and costumes, but also with exotic-sounding instruments, such as the clarinet, and a range of percussion, and music intended to evoke Turkish styles. At about the same time he married Constanze Weber, and his relationship grew strained with his father, who had approved neither of the young Mozart's move or his marriage. A visit home in 1783 helped improve relations, and upon his return to Vienna Mozart enjoyed some of his greatest successes. He began to collaborate with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a partnership that resulted in The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, and Così fan tutte in 1790. Don Giovanni, often accepted as the greatest musical achievement among the composer's twelve operas, balances the humor of its hero's romantic appeal and wandering eye with the eerie and dramatic spectacle of the statue of a wronged man coming to life and dragging him down to a well-deserved hellish damnation. Così fan tutte seems, on its surface, to be a mere light comedy, featuring devoted ladies whose sweethearts wager over whether they can be lured away to another lover in their absence. The story, with its confusion of identities and humor, accommodated some of Mozart's most charming writing. The conclusion, which muses on human weakness and begs for tolerance of mutual frailty, reveals the real depth of da Ponte's libretto as well as the thought behind Mozart's music. Despite his successes, Mozart had continued to seek financial stability, which he achieved with a court appointment in 1787. Mozart had always rebelled against a common tendency at courts to view musicians and composers as little more than skilled servants. He felt that he and his colleagues should be able to live affluently and to move freely in all kinds of society. His ability to manage money, though, did not keep pace with such pretensions, and so he and Constanze suffered chronically from financial troubles. The steady income of the new court position helped the composer to manage those troubles, although it did not end them.

Last Year and Beyond.

During the last year of Mozart's life, he completed another opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, as well as The Magic Flute. The latter opera is in German and with some spoken dialogue, but the plot has added themes not only from folk tales but also from the ideas of the Freemasons. Mozart had become a member of this society, and wrote a number of pieces for performances at its meetings. The opera's main figures, Tamino and Pamina, win both love and enlightenment amid a colorful and memorable collection of characters and dazzling arias that are graceful, amusing, or frightening as called for by the story line. In 1791 he began work on the famous Requiem Mass, which was commissioned anonymously by Count von Walsegg-Stuppach as a memorial to his wife. Mozart became ill with a fever and died before completing it. As was customary for persons of his station in Vienna at the time, he had a small funeral and was buried in a multiple grave. Constanze had his students and collaborators, Joseph Eybler and Franz Xaver Süssmayr, finish his Requiem. In the years that followed publishers began to put together collections of his works, while Constanze remarried and her second husband wrote a biography of Mozart.

Importance.

Mozart's enormous talents as a composer were more than a match for the continuously changing musical styles of the late eighteenth century. He did not invent new genres or forms, or create an entirely new style of composition. Rather, he used the new styles and forms that had already emerged in European music after 1750, making them his own and molding them into vehicles that were particularly expressive of his genius. His earliest writings relied not only on regional south German and Austrian styles but on Italian ones as well. An interest in counterpoint and careful, technical composition developed fairly early and remained with him. In Vienna, he discovered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and he studied and arranged some of his compositions. Throughout his brief life he composed music in many different genres, so in each of these some similar developments of his talents and interests are evident. His melodies balance a sense of natural progression with surprise and innovation. His string quartets, especially those produced after his encounters with Haydn, seem to have mastered the ideal of four equal musical voices in dialogue or conversation with one another. His symphonies are demanding of the performers, feature complex development of carefully worked themes, and combine the drama of recent styles with the complexities of counterpoint. His music became more complex over time, and a number of his later works gained a reputation among his contemporaries as being rewarding but difficult and challenging to listen to.