Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

There is a scene in the film Amadeus where Mozart stands at a billiard table to compose. As he writes, he repeatedly tosses a ball up the table without looking, and lets the random collisions impact on his thoughts. The point of the scene is that Mozart needed to break up the perfect symmetry of the music in his mind. The scene has basis in fact. Mozart’s perfection can be almost shocking. And he was a very keen billiards player.

Before Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (and Milos Forman’s film) elevated Mozart to near divinity, the nature of Mozart’s genius had long been a matter of fevered speculation. “A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing,” said the poet Goethe (1749–1832), setting the tone for the next two hundred years. Writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) said, “Mozart’s music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.” Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) put it more bluntly: “Mozart is the musical Christ.” Among his contemporaries he excited wonder and envy. It is, however, unlikely that any of them murdered him. The man and the myth are often hard to tell apart—but with a life like Mozart’s that is inevitable.

Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756. He began composing at the age of five, and at the age of six he performed as a virtuoso keyboard player before the Bavarian elector and the Austrian empress. At the age of seven he was writing symphonies. In 1763 his father, the composer Leopold Mozart (1719–1787), took him on a tour through the courts and concert halls of Europe that lasted three years. At the age of ten, intrigues prevented his first opera being performed in Vienna. Between 1770–1773 Mozart was largely in Italy, where he wrote two more operas. On his return to Vienna in 1773, he failed to secure a position equal to his talents, and devoted himself instead to writing string quartets—as well as a group of symphonies that survive in the modern repertory. Between 1774–1777 Mozart was Konzertmeister at the somewhat modest court of the Prince–Archbishop in Salzburg, where he wrote symphonies, masses, piano sonatas, and his first great piano concerto, no. 9 in E-flat.

In 1777 Mozart sought, and failed, to secure more prestigious posts in Mannheim and Munich. After the limited success of his Paris Symphony (no. 31), he returned to Salzburg, where he played at court and in the cathedral. A commission from the Munich Opera in 1780 produced his first great opera, Idomeneo. Heroic in scope, Idomeneo is remarkable for its seriousness, its emotional depth, and the richness of its orchestral textures. However, when he was invited to Vienna to join the Salzburg court in its celebrations on the accession of a new emperor, he found himself treated as a servant. He resigned in 1781. In 1782 his opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, tore through established operatic traditions with its intensely sustained songs and its elaborate decorations: the Emperor Joseph II, failing to recognize a masterpiece, remarked that it had “too many notes.” Mozart longed for a post at the Imperial court in Vienna, but the opportunity never came. Instead he supported himself in Vienna by teaching, publishing his works, playing at patrons’ houses, and endlessly composing. His string of 15 piano concertos, written between 1782–1786, are masterworks. In 1787 he secured a minor court post, which required him to do little more than compose occasional dance music for court balls.

In 1786 Mozart wrote the richly comic opera Le Nozze di Figaro. A year later the darker comedy of Don Giovanni demonstrated a profound insight into the nature of human desire and aspiration that took opera into unexplored territory. Cosi fan tutte (1790) transformed the conventional comedy of sexual manners into a sublime artifice, and Die Zauberflöte (1791), with its delicate traceries of allegory and ritual, turned standard theatrical themes into a dream of human enlightenment and universal harmony.

Mozart’s final years continued the extraordinary story of disappointed professional ambitions contrasting with stupendous productivity and achievement. Extravagant habits, an addiction to gambling, and waning popularity threw Mozart into debt—and occasional despair. None of this shows in the later works. The Symphony no. 41 in C reveals a new grandeur and forms the climax to his orchestral music. The Clarinet Concerto displays a lyrical invention that is astonishing even for Mozart. And the majestic and terrifying Requiem, which he left unfinished at his death, is perhaps the most tragic of all Mozart’s unfulfilled promises.

Mozart’s death was as quick and mysterious as his life. Two weeks before his death, he was in good health. The onset of the fever that killed him was sudden. He developed rashes and swellings, and then soon after died. The Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) was responsible for the story that Mozart was poisoned by his jealous teacher, Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). It’s a good story, but Mozart’s true story is quite strange and dramatic enough without it.

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