Mozart history timeline

How did mozart die
Constanze mozart
Mozart's greatest achievements

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Scholars now see Mozart not as a naïve prodigy or a suffering outcast but as a hardworking, ambitious musician.Illustration by Seth

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense blue-gray eyes. When he was in a convivial mood, his gaze was said to be warm, even seductive. But he often gave the impression of being not entirely present, as if his mind were caught up in an invisible event. Portraits suggest a man aware of his separation from the world. In one, he wears a hard, distant look; in another, his face glows with sadness. In several pictures, his left eye droops a little, perhaps from fatigue. “As touchy as gunpowder,” one friend called him. Nonetheless, he was generally well liked.

He was born in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1756, and he died in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1791. He was an urban creature, and had almost nothing to say about the charms of nature. A product of the artisan classes—his ancestors were bookbinders, weavers, and masons—he adopte

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Biography

There has never been a child prodigy in musical history to rival Mozart. He could compose and play the piano and the violin by the time he was six. His father Leopold was a composer and violinist in the service of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, hoping in due course to become Kapellmeister. Wolfgang and his sister Anna Maria (nicknamed Nannerl) were the only two of Leopold’s seven children to survive infancy. Both were musically talented and when, at the age of four, Wolfgang could not only memorise a piece in an hour but play it faultlessly, Leopold realised that he had a prodigy on his hands. There’s no doubt that part of Leopold’s motive was to make a great musician of his son and let the world know about his God-given gifts – but he exploited these gifts to the full.

Both children set off on their first tour with their father, with the idea of playing at various European courts, first to Munich and the Elector of Bavaria, then to Vienna, where Nannerl and Wolfgang played in front of the Empress Maria Theresia and the seven-year-old Mar

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The Birth of Mozart

Starting life with an ample supply of both genius and Christian names, Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart was born at eight in the evening in his family’s third-floor apartment at 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg. He was christened in Salzburg Cathedral at ten the next morning, so perhaps his parents were anxious about him. They had had six children before and only one of them had survived.

The baby was born on the feast day of St John Chrysostom and Wolfgang was his maternal grandfather’s name. Gottlieb, his godfather’s surname, was later translated into Theophilus or Amadeus, which the grown Wolfgang would use only in jest. Sigismundus, which he thought equally comic, was added at his confirmation.

Salzburg was not part of Austria at this time, but was ruled by its own prince-archbishop. The new baby’s father, Leopold Mozart, a German from Swabia originally, was a violinist at the prince-archbishop’s court. He was thirty-six and the baby’s mother, Maria Anna, was thirty. They had been married for fifteen years and Wolfgang wou