Wolfgang amadeus mozart biography german

Mozart is the most performed, the most mythologised, the most deconstructed, and the most popular of composers. He excelled in opera and in abstract genres such as the symphony and string quartet.

He was an entertainer from his early childhood. His teenage works are playful and untroubled, but even here there are richer, subtler shades. In the Romantic age, his mature music was either patronised for its prettiness or idealised as the emblem of a lost musical Eden.

Wolfgang amadeus mozart biography german

Yet at the same time we have an image of him as a demonically driven, tragic figure. Mozart grew up in a musical family; his father Leopold was a composer and noted violin teacher, and his older sister Marianne (‘Nannerl’) a gifted pianist.

Leopold was ambitious for his son, but Mozart was a true wunderkind. He composed his first works, for harpsichord, when barely out of his cradle. On an extended European concert tour he was hailed as a child touched with divine powers.

He wrote his earliest symphonies before