4. Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria. His father, Leopold Mozart, was an accomplished violinist of the Archbishop of Salzburg’s court. Additionally, Leopold had written a respected book on the playing of the violin. At a very young age, Wolfgang began his career as a composer and performer. A prodigy, his talent far exceeded any in music, past his contemporaries. He began writing music prior to the age of five. At the age of six, Wolfgang performed in the court of Empress Maria Theresa.

Mozart’s father was quite proud of his children, both being child prodigies. At age seven, Wolfgang, his father, and his older sister Maria Anna (nicknamed “Nannerl”) embarked on a tour featuring Wolfgang in London, Munich, and Paris. As was customary at the time, Wolfgang, the son, was promoted and pushed ahead with his musical career by his father, while his sister, the female, grew up traditionally, married, and eventually took care of her father Leopold in his later years. However, while the two siblings were still performing, these tours occurred from when Wolfgang was between the ages of six and seventeen. The tours, though, were quite demeaning for the young musical genius in that he was often looked upon as just a superficial genre of entertainment rather than being respected as a musical prodigy. He would often be asked to identify the tonality of a piece while listening to it or asked to sight read and perform with a cloth over his hands while at the piano. Still, the tours allowed young Mozart to accumulate knowledge about musical styles across Europe. As a composer prior to his teens, the young Mozart had already composed religious works, symphonies, solo sonatas, an opera buffa, and an operetta Bastien and Bastienne; in short, he had quickly mastered all the forms of music.

Back in Salzburg, Mozart was very unhappy due to being musically restrained by the restrictions of his patron the Archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus von Colloredo. At approximately the age of twenty-five, he moved to Vienna and became a freelance artist and pursued other opportunities. Another likely reason for Wolfgang’s ultimate departure to Vienna was to become independent of his father. Though Leopold was well-meaning and had sacrificed a great deal to ensure the future and happiness of his son, he was an overbearing father. Thus at the age of twenty-five, Mozart married Constance Weber. Mozart’s father did not view the marriage favorably and this marriage acted as a wedge, severing Wolfgang’s close ties to his father.

Wolfgang’s new life in Vienna, however, was not easy. For almost ten years, he struggled financially, unable to find the secure financial environment in which he had grown up. The music patronage system was still the main way for musicians to prosper and thrive. For several times, Mozart was considered for patron employment but was not hired. Having hired several other musicians ahead of Mozart, Emperor Joseph II hired Mozart to basically compose dances for the court’s balls. As the tasks were far beneath his musical genius, Mozart was quite bitter about this assignment.

While in Vienna, Mozart relied on his teaching to sustain him and his family. His other income source was giving concerts. He would write piano concertos for annual concerts and their programs would also include some arias, solo improvisation, and possibly an overture of piece by another composer.

The peak of Mozart’s career success occurred in 1786 with the writing of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, libretto by Lorenza da Ponte). The opera was a hit in Prague and Vienna. The city of Prague, so impressed with the opera, commissioned another piece by Mozart. Mozart, with da Ponte again as librettist, then composed Don Giovanni. The second opera left the audience somewhat confused. Mozart’s luster and appeal seemed to have passed. As a composer, Mozart was trying to expand the spectrum, or horizons of the musical world. Therefore, his music sometimes had to be viewed more than once by the audience in order for them to understand and appreciate it. Mozart was pushing the musical envelope beyond the standard entertainment expected by his aristocratic audience, and patrons in general did not appreciate it. In a letter to Mozart, Emperor Joseph II wrote of Don Giovanni that the opera was perhaps better than The Marriage of Figaro but that it did not set well on the pallet of the Viennese. Mozart quickly fired back, responding that the Viennese perhaps needed more time to understand it.

In the final year of his life, Mozart with librettist (actor/poet) Emanuel Schikaneder, wrote a very successful opera for the Viennese theatre, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). The newly acclaimed famous composer was quickly hired to write a piece (as well as attend) for the coronation of the new Emperor, Leopold II, as King of Bohemia. The festive opera that Mozart composed for this event was called La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus). Its audience, overly indulged and exhausted from the coronation, was not impressed with Mozart’s work. Mozart returned home, depressed and broken, and began working on a requiem, which, coincidentally, would be his last composition.

The Requiem was commissioned by a count who intended to pass the work off as his own. Mozart’s health failed shortly after receiving this commission and the composer died, just before his 36th birthday, before completing the piece. Mozart’s favorite student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, completed the work from Mozart’s sketch scores, with some insertions of his own, while rumors spread that Mozart was possibly poisoned by another contemporary composer. In debt at the time of his death, Mozart was given a common burial. As one commentator wrote:

Thus, “without a note of music, forsaken by all he held dear, the remains of this Prince of Harmony were committed to the earth, not even in a grave of their own, but in the common fosse affected to the indiscriminate sepulture of homeless mendicants and nameless waifs.”^[1]

Overview of Mozart’s Music

From Mozart’s youth, his musical intellect and capability were unmatched. His contemporaries often noted that Mozart seemed to have already heard, edited, listened to, and visualized entire musical works in his mind before raising a pen to compose them on paper. When he took a pen in hand, he would basically transcribe the work in his head onto the manuscript paper. Observers also said that Mozart could listen and carry on conversations with others while transcribing his music to paper. Mozart was musically very prolific in his short life. He composed operas, church music, a requiem, string quartets, string quintets, mixed quintets and quartets, concertos, piano sonatas, and many lighter chamber pieces (such as divertimentos), including his superb Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music). His violin and piano sonatas are among the best ever written both in form and emotional content. Six of his quartets were dedicated to Haydn, whose influence Mozart celebrated in their preface.

Mozart additionally wrote exceptional keyboard music, particularly since he was respected as one of the finest pianists of the Classical period. He loved the instrument dearly and wrote many solo works, as well as more than twenty concertos for piano and orchestra, thus contributing greatly to the concerto’s popularity as an acceptable medium. Many of these concertos were premiered at Mozart’s annual public fundraising concerts. Of his many piano solo pieces, the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 and the Sonata in C minor, K. 457 are representative of his most famous.

And Mozart composed more than forty symphonies, the writing of which extended across his entire career. He was known for the full and rich instrumentation and voicing of his symphonies. His conveying of emotion and mood are especially portrayed in these works. His final six symphonies, written in the last decade of his life, are the most artistically self-motivated independent of art patronage and supervision that might stifle creativity. Mozart’s late and great symphonies include the Haffner in D (1782), the Linz in C (1783), the Prague in D (1786), and his last three symphonies composed in 1788. Mozart’s final symphony probably was not performed prior to his death. In addition to the symphonies and piano concertos, Mozart composed other major instrumental works for clarinet, violin, and French horn.

Focus Composition: “Deh, vieni alla finestra, Testo” from Don Giovanni

The synopsis of Don Giovanni can be found here.

Focus Composition: First Movement, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466

Classical period composers took the Baroque concerto for soloist and orchestra and expanded it into a much larger form. Mozart’s concertos were generally in three movements, in fast, slow, and fast tempos, respectively. The first movements of Mozart’s concertos also featured the alternation of ritornello sections and solo sections, like we heard in the concerto by Vivaldi in the previous chapter. Mozart, however, also used the sonata form in the first movements of his concertos, resulting in a form that we now call double exposition form. In a double exposition form, the first statement of the exposition was assigned to the orchestra, and the second statement of the exposition was assigned to the soloist accompanied by the orchestra. The alternation between orchestra and soloist sections continues in the development and recapitulation. Near the end of the recapitulation and during the final orchestral ritornello (thematic statement from the exposition), the orchestra holds a suspenseful chord, at which point the soloist enters and the orchestra drops out. For a minute or longer, the soloist plays a cadenza. A cadenza is a solo section that sounds improvised, though sometimes composers or performers wrote these ahead of time, as is the case with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 (the recording below features a cadenza that was written by Beethoven). A cadenza in a piano concerto normally ends with the pianist sustaining a chord (often with a trill) signaling the orchestra’s final entrance in the piece, playing the last phrase of the ritornello to bring the movement to a conclusion.

You can see here how ritornello form and sonata form (exposition—development—recapitulation) are merged in a double exposition form:

The first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, is a good example of double exposition form. As the program annotator for the Burgess Hill Symphony Orchestra puts it:

The orchestral tutti opens with the D minor first subject. This suggests dark threatening skies, emphasised [sic] by syncopation and dynamic contrasts. For a brief while the louring mood is relieved by the second subject, which has modulated into F major. The solo piano makes its entry with a plaintive new theme back in D minor—a little theme that refuses to go away. As the development progresses Mozart reviews all his themes, and presses onwards to a rather stormy climax leading to the cadenza. Mozart left no written cadenzas for this work. When the score came into the hands of Beethoven, he immediately decided that such a dramatic movement as this sorely needed one. He promptly sat down and wrote the shadowed brilliance that will be played by today’s soloist.^[2]

You can also listen to this lecture recital about the first movement of the concerto.

Focus Composition: First Movement, Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551

Mozart wrote forty-one symphonies. His last symphony, Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, is one of his greatest compositions. It very quickly acquired the nickname “Jupiter,” a reference to the Greek god, perhaps because of its grand scale and use of complex musical techniques, including the more modulations (key changes) he wrote in this piece than was typical.

Here is a live-performance video recording of Mozart’s symphony No. 41, performed by Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, conducted by Lorin Maazel.

It is impossible to know how many more operas and symphonies Mozart would have written had he lived into his forties, fifties, or even sixties. Haydn’s music written after the death of Mozart shows the influence of his younger contemporary, and Beethoven’s early music was also shaped by Mozart’s. In fact, in 1792, the twenty-something Beethoven was sent to Vienna with the expressed purpose of receiving “the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.”