Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (, ), baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era.
Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.
Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is profound; Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."
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“One must not make oneself cheap here—that is a cardinal point—or else one is done. Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
“My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great- grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
“Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“It is a great mistake to suppose that clever, imaginative children ... should content themselves with the empty nonsense which is so often set before them under the name of Children’s Tales. They want something much better; and it is surprising how much they see and appreciate which escapes a good, honest, well- informed papa.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“One must not make oneself cheap here—that is a cardinal point—or else one is done. Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)