Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) is among the most significant and enduringly popular composers of European classical music. His enormous output includes works that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Many of his works are part of the standard concert repertory and are widely recognized as masterpieces of the classical style. Mozart himself is universally recognized as a musical genius, having learned to compose at the age of five and showing an encyclopedic grasp of every musical form of his time despite having lived only for 35 years.

Works, musical style, and innovations

Mozart was the central representative of the classical style, and his works spanned the chronological period from the early, Italianate galant style of his teenage years to the mature classical style of his later life, which began to re-incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque. Mozart was a prolific composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintets, and the keyboard sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. Mozart also wrote a great deal of religious music including masses. He also composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment.

Related Topics:
Classical - Galant - Contrapuntal - Baroque - Symphony - Opera - Concerto - String quartet - String quintet - Mass - Divertimenti

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The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart's music. Clarity, balance, transparency, and uncomplicated harmonic language are his hallmark, although in his later works he explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. Mozart is routinely named along with Schubert as having the most dependable gift for pure, simple, and memorable melody of all the composers of the classical era.

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From his earliest life Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he traveled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language. When he went to London as a child, he met JC Bach and heard his music; when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra; when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and the opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic and dominant, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are essentially Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are "homotonal" (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the tonic minor). Others mimic the works of JC Bach, and others show the simple, rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna.

Related Topics:
JC Bach - Italian overture - Opera buffa - Cadencing - Rounded binary form

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As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of the abandoned Baroque styles into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major, K. 201, uses a frankly contrapuntal main theme; in addition, in it he began to experiment with irregular phrase lengths, something a galant composer such as Sammartini would never have done. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had just published his opus 20 set; the influence of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers of the time.

Related Topics:
Symphony No. 29 - Sammartini

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In Mozarts's hands sonata form transformed from the binary models of the baroque into the fully mature form of his later works, with a multiple-theme exposition, extended, chromatic and contrapuntal development, recapitulation of all themes in the tonic key, and coda.

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Throughout his life Mozart switched his focus from writing instrumental music to writing operas, and back again. He wrote operas in each style current in Europe: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo or Don Giovanni; and singspiel, of which the Magic Flute is probably the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas, he developed the use of subtle and slight changes of instrumentation, orchestration, and tone color to express or highlight psychological or emotional states and dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted upon one another. The increasing sophistication of his use of the orchestra in his symphonies and concerti served as a resource in his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas reacted back upon his purely instrumental composition.

Related Topics:
The Marriage of Figaro - Così fan tutte - Opera seria - Idomeneo - Don Giovanni - Singspiel - Magic Flute

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Influence

Many important composers since Mozart's time have worshipped or at least been in awe of Mozart. Rossini averred, "He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge." Beethoven told his pupil Ries that he (Beethoven) would never be able to think of a melody as great as a certain one in the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24. Beethoven also paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on several of his themes: for example, the two sets of variations for cello and piano on themes from Mozart's Magic Flute, and cadenzas to several of Mozart's piano concertos, most notably the Piano Concerto No. 20, K466 (see below for this system and an explanation). After the only meeting between the two composers, Mozart noted that Beethoven would "give the world something to talk about." As well, Tchaikovsky wrote his Mozartiana in praise of him; and Mahler died with the name "Mozart" on his lips. The variations theme of the opening movement of the A major piano sonata (K331) was used by Max Reger for his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, written in 1914 and among his best-known works in turn.

Related Topics:
Rossini - Beethoven - Ries - Piano Concerto No. 24 - Variations - Magic Flute - Piano Concerto No. 20 - Tchaikovsky - Mahler - The A major piano sonata - Max Reger

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The Köchel catalogue

In the decades following Mozart's death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel succeeded in this enterprise. Many of his famous works are referred to now by only their Köchel catalogue number; for example, the Piano Concerto in A major is often referred to simply as "K488" or "KV488". The catalogue has undergone six revisions since.

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