Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Essay Research Paper Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Essay, Research Paper

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 1756 — 1791 Composer. Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg. His father, Leopold Mozart, a noted composer and pedagogue and the author of a famous treatise on violin playing, was then in the service of the archbishop of Salzburg. Together with his sister, Nannerl, Wolfgang received such intensive musical training that by the age of six, he was a budding composer and an accomplished keyboard performer. In 1762, Leopold presented his son as a performer at the imperial court in Vienna, and from 1763 to 1766, he escorted both children on a continuous musical tour across Europe. The tour included long stays in Paris and London as well as visits to many other cities, with appearances before the French and English royal families.

Mozart was the most celebrated child prodigy of this time as a keyboard performer and made a great impression, too, as composer and improviser. In London, he won the admiration of so eminent a musician as Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782), and he was exposed from an early age to an unusual variety of musical styles and tastes across the Continent.

Salzburg and Italy, 1766-1773

From his tenth to his seventeenth year, Mozart grew in stature as a composer to a degree of maturity equal to that of his most eminent older contemporaries; as he continued to expand his conquest of current musical styles, he outstripped them. He spent the years 1766-1769 in Salzburg, writing instrumental works and music for school dramas in German and Latin. In 1768, he produced his first real operas: the German Singspiel (that is, with spoken dialogue) Bastien und Bastienne and the opera buffa La finta semplice. Artless and naive as La finta semplice is when compared to his later Italian operas, it nevertheless shows a latent sense of character portrayal and fine accuracy of Italian text setting.

Despite his reputation as a prodigy, Mozart found no suitable post open to him. With his father once more as an escort, the 14-year-old Mozart set off for Italy in 1769 to try to make his way as an opera composer, the field in which he openly declared his ambition to succeed and that offered higher financial rewards than other forms of composition at this time.

Mozart was well received in Italy: in Milan, he obtained a commission for an opera; in Rome, he was made a member of an honorary knightly order by the Pope; and in Bologna, the Accademia Filarmonica awarded him membership despite a rule normally requiring candidates to be 20 years old. During these years of travel in Italy and returns to Salzburg between journeys, he produced his first large-scale settings of opera seria (that is, court opera on serious subjects): Mitridate (1770), Ascanio in Alba (1771), and Lucio Silla (1772), as well as his first String Quartets. At Salzburg in late 1771, he renewed his writing of Symphonies (Nos. 14-21).

In these operatic works, Mozart displays a complete mastery of the varied styles of aria required for the great virtuoso singers of the day (especially large-scale da capo arias), this being the sole authentic requirement of this type of opera. The strong leaning of these works toward the singers’ virtuosity rather than toward dramatic content made the opera seria a rapidly dying form by Mozart’s time, but in Lucio Silla he nonetheless shows clear evidence of his power of dramatic expression within individual scenes.

Salzburg, 1773-1777

During this period, Mozart remained primarily in Salzburg, employed as concertmaster of the archbishop’s court musicians. In 1773, a new archbishop took office, Hieronymus Colloredo, who was a newcomer to Salzburg and its provincial ways. Unwilling to countenance the frequent absences of the Mozarts, he declined to promote Leopold to the post of chapel master that he had long coveted. The archbishop showed equally little understanding of young Mozart’s special gifts. In turn Mozart abhorred Salzburg, but he could find no better post. In 1775, he went off to Munich, where he produced the opera buffa La finta giardiniera with great success but without tangible consequences. In this period at Salzburg he wrote nine Symphonies (Nos. 22-30), including the excellent No. 29 in A Major; a large number of divertimenti, including the Haffner Serenade; all of his six Concertos for Violin, several other concertos, and church music for use at Salzburg.

Mannheim and Paris, 1777-1779

Despite his continued productivity, Mozart was wholly dissatisfied with provincial Austria, and in 1777, he set off for new destinations: Munich, Augsburg, and prolonged stays in Mannheim and Paris. Mannheim was the seat of a famous court orchestra, along with a fine opera house. Mozart wrote a number of attractive works there (including his three Flute Quartets and five of his Violin Sonatas), but he was not offered a post.

Paris was a vastly larger theater for Mozart’s talents (his father urged him to go there, for “from Paris the fame of a man of great talent echoes through the whole world,” he wrote his son). But after nine difficult months in Paris, from March 1778 to January 1779, Mozart returned once more to Salzburg, having been unable to secure a foot-hold and depressed by the entire experience, which had included the death of his mother in the midst of his stay in Paris. Unable to get a commission for an opera (still his ch