1756–1791 
COMPOSER AUSTRIA
I declare to you on my honour that he is the greatest composer who ever lived.
—JOSEPH HAYDN, COMPOSER, SPEAKING OF MOZART
Five-year-old Wolfgang could not hold it in anymore. All morning the music had run through his head, and he just had to write it down. He waited impatiently until his father, Leopold, went out for a coffee with a friend. Grabbing a quill and his father’s inkwell and forgetting that he had not yet learned to write, he filled a page with smudgy notes.
“What are you doing?!” Leopold burst in on the boy.
“I am writing a concerto. It will be done soon,” replied Wolfgang calmly, already sure of himself. Both men laughed and winked at each other. How cute, they thought . . . the boy imitating his father, the court composer for the archbishop of Salzburg, Austria. But when Leopold read the notes, he began to cry for joy. His tiny son had indeed written a complicated and well-organized concerto.
Mozart’s whole name was Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. Gottlieb means, in German, “God-loved.” After dropping the first two names, and changing Gottlieb to its Latin synonym (AMA=love; DEUS=God), he was known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
This ink-stained beginning was the first of over six hundred pieces of music that Mozart wrote, many of them complex symphonies he created in one sitting. He said that, before he wrote a single note, he heard the entire piece in his head, sometimes with as many as twelve different instruments. He wrote feverishly, perfectly, with no revising. Many people then and now consider Mozart to be the greatest composer the world has ever known.
Unlike today, when geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg earn big money from investors, in Mozart’s day talented people could only find success if they won the favor of royalty. Instead of being seen as artists, they were seen merely as craftsman, like a good carpenter or tailor. If you had talent then, your only hope was to be noticed and rewarded by your king or queen.
Mozart’s dad, knowing that he had a child prodigy on his hands, saw young Wolfgang as the family’s ticket to fame and fortune. So when Wolfgang was six, his father took him and his sister Nannerl, who was also talented, on a three-year tour of Europe. Dressed up as a miniature adult, complete with a powdered white wig, Wolfgang performed musical tricks, like instantly playing any new piece given to him or playing the harpsichord with the keys hidden under a cloth.
Beethoven was one of Mozart’s piano students.
Wolfgang and Nannerl played for the kings and queens of Austria, France, and England, and everyone loved the talented children. Love, however, did not pay the bills, and Wolfgang’s father was constantly frustrated by the stinginess of the royal families. They often would reward his children with nothing more than a golden snuffbox or some other small trinket.
Young Mozart charmed the empress of Austria when he asked her little daughter, Marie, to marry him. Marie grew up to be the famous Marie Antoinette, queen of France. Perhaps she should’ve married Mozart—she died at the guillotine when rebels overthrew the French monarchy.
When the family returned to Salzburg, the archbishop there accused Mozart’s father of writing all the music his young son had composed. The archbishop locked Wolfgang in a palace room for a week and ordered him to write some music for the church. It took Wolfgang less than seven days to produce a musical score of 208 sheets of paper. The archbishop was convinced. When Mozart was just fourteen, he wrote and directed his first opera.
Wolfgang spent his entire childhood touring, except for brief visits back to Salzburg and time recovering from smallpox, typhoid, and other illnesses. These illnesses probably contributed to his early death. By age twenty-one, Wolfgang had traveled all over Europe, composing and performing sonatas, concertos, symphonies, church music, music for string quartets, and opera for kings and queens.
It is easy to think that geniuses have it easy. But with music flowing out of his fingertips as fast as most people form a sentence, Mozart had to answer to people who saw him as a freak of nature, a person who didn’t have to work hard:
If you want to learn more about Mozart’s life, check out the movie AMADEUS.
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.4
Despite his genius and amazing devotion to his craft, as an adult, Mozart usually could not scrape together enough coins to pay for food, fuel, or rent. He was often at the mercy of stingy noblemen who took advantage of his skills while paying him very little to write what he considered boring, uninspired pieces for their parties. When he did finally find a patron, he couldn’t even ask for a decent salary, but instead had to humbly take whatever was offered. He also had to suffer the embarrassment, even though he was praised as the most divinely inspired composer ever, of being seated at the servants’ table.
Once a friend stopped by Mozart’s apartment and found him and his wife waltzing wildly. “What are you doing dancing with no music?” he asked. “Keeping warm,” answered Mozart. The couple had no money for firewood.
Even though the times he lived in made it hard to earn money, Mozart compounded his own problems: when he did have money, he blew it. Have you ever noticed that the smartest kid in class can never find his calculator, or that your brilliant mother is always losing her purse? Sometimes the smartest people seem to have gaping brain-holes for the more practical matters of life. That was Mozart. Because he was so bad at making and keeping money, Mozart never earned enough to relax. Instead of being able to compose music, which was all he wanted to do, Mozart had to teach piano most of the day, perform at small parties in the evenings, and then squeeze in his composing during the very latest hours.
Mozart worked nonstop and grew weaker and more exhausted as he got older. At thirty-five he received a fearful omen: a mysterious stranger appeared at his door and asked him to write a requiem mass (a funeral song). The stranger would not reveal his identity, and as Mozart worked on the requiem, his health got worse and worse. He became convinced the stranger was a messenger from God and that he was writing his own funeral music. He was. Mozart died before the piece was finished.
Mozart was famous in his lifetime and even more famous today. There has never been another genius like him. The music that poured out of Mozart more than two hundred years ago is still played, in television commercials, in movie soundtracks, and of course in concert halls. You may not know that you know Mozart, but you do; his music is all around us.