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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ) (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 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

Mozart was born in the city of Salzburg, the capital of the independent archbishopric of Salzburg, which today is part of Austria, to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart. He was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert's Cathedral. The baptismal record gives his name in Latinized form as . Of these names, the first two were saints' names not employed in everyday life and the fourth was variously translated in Mozart's lifetime as ; Mozart himself preferred the third (see Mozart's name).

Mozart's musical ability became apparent when he was about three years old. His father Leopold was one of Europe's leading musical pedagogues (excellent teachers), whose influential textbook ("Essay on the fundamentals of violin playing") was published in 1756, the year of Mozart's birth. Mozart received intensive musical training from his father, including instruction in clavier, violin, and organ.

During his formative years, Mozart completed several journeys throughout Europe, beginning with an exhibition in 1762 at the Court of the Elector of Bavaria in Munich, then in the same year at the Imperial Court in Vienna. A long concert tour spanning three and a half years followed, taking him with his father to the courts of Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, The Hague, again to Paris, and back home via Zürich, Donaueschingen, and Munich. They again went to Vienna in late 1767 and remained there until December 1768.

After one year in Salzburg, three trips to Italy followed: from December 1769 to March 1771, from August to December 1771, and from October 1772 to March 1773. During the first of these trips, Mozart met Andrea Luchesi in Venice and G.B. Martini in Bologna and was accepted as a member of the famous . A highlight of the Italian journey, now an almost legendary tale, occurred when he heard Gregorio Allegri's once in performance in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; he thus produced the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican .

On July 3, 1778, accompanied by his mother, Mozart began a tour of Europe that included Munich, Mannheim, and Paris, where his mother died.

During his trips, Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other great composers. A particularly important influence was Johann Christian Bach, who befriended Mozart in London in 1764–65. Bach's work is often taken to be an inspiration for the distinctive surface texture of Mozart's music, though not its architecture or drama.

Even non-musicians caught Mozart's attention. He was so taken by the sound created by Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica that he composed several pieces of music for it.

In 1781 Mozart visited Vienna in the company of his employer, the harsh Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, and soon fell out with him. According to Mozart's own testimony, he was dismissed - literally - "with a kick in the seat of the pants." Mozart chose to settle and develop his career in Vienna after its aristocracy began to take an interest in him.

On August 4, 1782, against his father's wishes, he married Constanze Weber (1762-1842) (also spelled "Costanze"; she was one of Carl Maria von Weber's cousins). Although they had six children, only two survived infancy. Neither of these two, Karl Thomas (1784–1858) and Franz Xaver Wolfgang (1791-1844; later a minor composer himself), married or had children.

The year 1782 was an auspicious one for Mozart's career; his opera ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was a great success and he began a series of concerts at which he premiered his own piano concertos as conductor and soloist.

During 1782–83, Mozart became closely acquainted with the work of J.S. Bach and George Frideric Handel as a result of the influence of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who owned many manus of works by the Baroque masters. Mozart's study of these works led first to a number of works imitating Baroque and later had a powerful influence on his own personal musical language, for example the fugal passages in ("The Magic Flute") and the Symphony No. 41.

In 1783, Wolfgang and Constanze visited Leopold in Salzburg, but the visit was not a success, as his father did not open his heart to Constanze. However, the visit sparked the composition of one of Mozart's great liturgical pieces, the Mass in C Minor, which was premiered in Salzburg, and is presently one of his best known works. Wolfgang featured Constanze as the lead female solo voice at the premiere of the work, hoping to endear her to his father's affection. Constanze was renowned for her exquisite singing voice.

In his early Vienna years, Mozart met Joseph Haydn and the two composers became friends. When Haydn visited Vienna, they sometimes played in an impromptu string quartet. Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782–85, and are often judged to be his response to Haydn's Opus 33 set from 1781. Haydn was soon in awe of Mozart, and when he first heard the last three of Mozart's series he told Leopold, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition."

During the years 1782-1785, Mozart put on a series of concerts in which he appeared as soloist in his piano concertos, widely considered among his greatest works. These concerts were financially successful. After 1785 Mozart performed far less and wrote only a few concertos. Maynard Solomon conjectures that he may have suffered from hand injuries; another possibility is that the fickle public ceased to attend the concerts in the same numbers.

Mozart was influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment as an adult, and became a Freemason (1784). His lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than a deistic one and he worked fervently and successfully to convert his father before the latter's death in 1787. His last opera, , includes Masonic themes and allegory. He was in the same Masonic Lodge as Haydn.

Mozart's life was fraught with financial difficulty and illness. Often, he received no payment for his work, and what sums he did receive were quickly consumed by his extravagant life.

Mozart spent 1786 in Vienna in an apartment (in the "Mozarthaus") which may be visited today at Domgasse 5 behind St Stephen's Cathedral; it was here that Mozart composed

Mozart had a special relationship with Prague and the people of Prague. The audience here celebrated their Figaro with the much deserved reverence he was missing in his hometown Vienna. His quote "Meine Prager verstehen mich" () became very famous in the Bohemian lands. Many tourists follow his tracks in Prague and visit the Mozart Museum of the Villa Bertramka where they can enjoy a chamber concert. In Prague, premiered on October 29, 1787 at the Theatre of the Estates. In the later years of his life, Prague provided Mozart many financial resources from commissions. German poet Eduard Mörike's well-known novella ("Mozart on the way to Prague"Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a fantasy about the composer's trip to that city in order to present

Mozart's final illness and death are difficult topics of scholarship, obscured by romantic legends and replete with conflicting theories. Scholars disagree about the course of decline in Mozart's health—particularly at what point Mozart became aware of his impending death and whether this awareness influenced his final works. The romantic view holds that Mozart declined gradually and that his outlook and compositions paralleled this decline. In opposition to this, some contemporary scholarship points out correspondence from Mozart's final year indicating that he was in good cheer, as well as evidence that Mozart's death was sudden and a shock to his family and friends. Mozart's last words: "The taste of death is upon my lips...I feel something not of this earth". The actual cause of Mozart's death is also a matter of conjecture. His death record listed "hitziges Frieselfieber" ("severe miliary fever"), a deion that does not suffice to identify the cause as it would be diagnosed in modern medicine. Dozens of theories have been proposed, including trichinosis, mercury poisoning, and rheumatic fever. The contemporary practice of bleeding medical patients is also cited as a contributing cause.

Mozart died around 1 a.m. on December 5, 1791 in Vienna, while he was working on his final composition, the Requiem. A younger composer, and Mozart's only pupil at the time Franz Xaver Süssmayr, was engaged by Constanze to complete the Requiem. He was not the only composer asked to complete the Requiem but is associated with it over others due to his significant contribution.

According to popular legend, Mozart was penniless and forgotten when he died, and was buried in a pauper's grave. In fact, though he was no longer as fashionable in Vienna as before, he continued to have a well-paid job at court and receive substantial commissions from more distant parts of Europe, Prague in particular. Many of his begging letters survive but they are evidence not so much of poverty as of his habit of spending more than he earned. He was not buried in a "mass grave" but in a regular communal grave according to the 1784 laws. Though the original grave in the St. Marx cemetery was lost, memorial gravestones (or cenotaphs) have been placed there and in the Zentralfriedhof. In 2005, new DNA testing was performed by Austria's University of Innsbruck and the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland to determine if a skull in an Austrian Museum was actually his, using DNA samples from the marked graves of his grandmother and Mozart's niece. However, test results were inconclusive, showing that none of the DNA samples were related to each other.

In 1809, Constanze married Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen (1761-1826). Being a fanatical admirer of Mozart, he edited vulgar passages out of many of the composer's letters and wrote a Mozart biography.

The work of Mozart, like that of Haydn, stands as an archetypal example of the Classical which began to incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque, complexities against which the was a reaction. Mozart's own stylistic development closely paralleled the maturing of the classical as a whole. In addition, he 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.

The central traits of the classical 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 commonly named along with Schubert as having a gift for pure, simple, and memorable melody, and to many listeners this is his most definitive characteristic.

From his earliest life Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he travelled 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 J.C. 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 was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other chords, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This 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 J.C. Bach, and others show the simple, rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna.

As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of the abandoned Baroque s into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major K. 201, uses a contrapuntal main theme; in addition, in it he began to experiment with irregular phrase lengths, something a composer such as Sammartini never did. 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 ) period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers at that time.

In Mozart'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.

Throughout his life Mozart switched his focus from writing instrumental music to writing operas, and back again. He wrote operas in each 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 colour 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 was reflected in his later non-operatic compositions.

Many important composers since Mozart's time have expressed profound appreciation of Mozart. Rossini averred, "He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge." Beethoven's admiration for Mozart is also quite clear. Beethoven used Mozart as a model a number of times; for example, Beethoven's A-major Quartet from Op. 18 makes careful use of Mozart's Quartet in A K. 464. Beethoven even copied out most of the Mozart quartet before he wrote his own A-major quartet, attempting to discern how Mozart constructed the piece. A plausible story--not corroborated--regards one of Beethoven's students who looked through a pile of music in Beethoven's apartment. When the student pulled out the Mozart A-major Quartet, Beethoven exclaimed "Ah, that piece. That's Mozart saying 'here's what I could do, if only you had ears to hear!'"; Beethoven's own Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor is an obvious tribute to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, and yet another plausible--if unconfirmed--story concerns Beethoven at a concert with his sometime-student Ferdinand Ries. As they listened to Mozart's C-minor concerto Piano Concerto No. 24, the orchestra reached the quite unusual coda of the last movement, and Beethoven whispered to Ries: "We'll never think of anything like that!" Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and Winds is another obvious tribute to Mozart, similar to Mozart's own Quintet of the same kind. 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 , 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 in praise of him; and Mahler died with the name "Mozart" on his lips. The variations theme of the opening movement of the ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. See templates for deletion to help reach a consensus on what to do. ›

In the decades after 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 by their Köchel catalogue number; for example, the (Piano Concerto No. 23Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often referred to simply as "K.488" or "KV.488". The catalogue has undergone six revisions going from K1 to K626.

Mozart is unusual among composers for being the subject of an abundance of legend, much due to the problem that none of his early biographers knew him personally. They often resorted to fiction in order to produce a work. Many myths began soon after Mozart died, but few have any basis in fact. An example is the story that Mozart composed his Requiem with the belief it was for himself. Sorting out fabrications from real events is a vexing and continuous task for Mozart scholars mainly because of the prevalence of legend in scholarship. Dramatists and screenwriters, free from responsibilities of scholarship, have found excellent material among these legends.

An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and, in some versions, the tale that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart's death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin's play . The last of these has been made into a feature-length film of the same name, which won eight Oscars. Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated.

According to an essay by A. Peter Brown, "the Mozart mania of the 1980s was initiated by Peter Shaffer's play . It and the subsequent film directed by Miloš Forman did more for Mozart's case than anything else in the two hundred years since the composer's death." The same could be said of the popular myths currently surrounding Mozart, many of which are firmly rooted in the film.

However, Shaffer and Forman have never claimed that was based in fact, as pointed out by Shaffer himself: "From the start we agreed on one thing: we were not making an objective Life of Wolfgang Mozart. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film is even less of one."

Shaffer and Forman are equally quick to defend elements of the film which they believe are accurate but are disputed by Mozart historians. Shaffer has detailed in many interviews, including one featured as an extra on the DVD release of the film, how the dramatic narrative was inspired by the biblical story of Cain and Abel—one brother loved by God, and the other scorned. Transcribed as creative rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, the notion of divine blessing and murderous jealousy provides the basic premise for , although there is no historical evidence of any rivalry between the two composers. Conversely, it is well documented that Salieri frequently lent Mozart musical scores from the court library, and Mozart selected Salieri to teach his son, Franz Xaver. One of the more detailed essays on the "dramatic licenses" present in Abel: A Cinematic Transformation of Genesis 4".

Another area of debate involves Mozart's prodigy as a composer from childhood until his death. While some have criticised many of his earlier works as simplistic or forgettable, others revere even Mozart's juvenilia.

The image of Mozart as the divinely inspired effortless creator, popularized by the film , is generally believed to be an exaggeration. Quite the contrary, Mozart was a studiously hard worker, and by his own admission his extensive knowledge and abilities developed out of many years' close study of the European musical tradition.

Benjamin Simkin, M.D., put forth an argument in his book, that Mozart had Tourette syndrome. PMID 1286388 Dr. Simkin is an endocrinologist -- not a psychiatrist or a neurologist, the medical fields which specialize in Tourette syndrome. His claim was picked up by newspapers worldwide, causing an international sensation. Internet websites of dubious reliability have fueled the speculation. Letters he wrote to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla ("Bäsle") between 1777 and 1781 contain scatological language and he wrote canons titled ). This alone is not indicative of Tourette syndrome, and there are alternative explanations for his use of language. The noted neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, published an editorial disputing Simkin's claim (PMID 1286364) and the Tourette Syndrome Association pointed out the speculative nature of this information. (TSA) No Tourette's syndrome expert, organization, psychiatrist or neurologist has yet to concur that there is credible evidence that Mozart had Tourette's, and several have stated now that they do not believe there is enough evidence to conclude that Mozart had Tourette's. [1]

WAMozartFan.com The Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Educational Fanpage - resource for students, teachers and music lovers.Mozart Forum Exploring the world of Classical-Era Music (1770-1827), encompassing the music, personalities and accomplishments of Mozart and his contemporaries.Mozart cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.Mozart's Thematic Catalogue - turn the pages of Mozart's musical diary online (requires Shockwave plugin)gallica.bnf.fr, picture of Mozart, his mother, his father, his wife, and his family (bnf = French National Library).

It is well-known that Mozart died at the young age of 35. In the spoken introduction to one of his songs ("Alma"), satirist Tom Lehrer remarked on how some people in the news "make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years!"

Mozart effect, a disputed theory that certain kinds of music enhance performance on certain mental tasks; the researchers who coined the term used a piece by Mozart in their first study.