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The chapter analyses the life and achievements of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and reveals his career transition from child prodigy to mature adult artist. The purpose in this chapter is to outline the ways in which an understanding of psychological and social research can illuminate and deepen an appreciation of Mozart's life and achievements. This chapter begins by discussing the composers early life, and the manner in which he epitomizes many of the problems of the nature-nurture debate. His transition from child prodigy to mature adult artist illustrates the pressures that typically confront juvenile successes in other fields. Even though Mozart enjoyed periods of great popularity as an adult, at the same time he experienced many difficulties, frustrations, and sorrows. His capacity to transcend these problems is a tribute to exceptional resilience. The chapter also exemplifies research on life stress and health that draws a convenient distinction between acute life events and long-term stressors.

This chapter examines how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was “Beethovenized” in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains that Beethovenized means that the music of Mozart's which became the most admired was that which exhibited the qualities of power and the infinite that Beethoven's music was seen to exhibit in the Romantic characterization of his genius. The chapter also discusses Soren Kierkegaard's view of Mozart's connection with the daemonic and Antonio Salieri's opinion that Mozart is a genius at the extreme end of a continuum.

Robert Levin became a fortepianist by accident. What makes Levin uncommon is that he introduces into the Mozart works he performs: he does not play the same notes at each performance but makes some of them up on the spot. We now think of music in terms of a division of labor: the composer writes it, the performer plays it. In Mozart’s time, genres like the opera aria and the concerto still called for a good deal of performer input. In these works, Mozart did not write down all of the passagework, lead-ins, and cadenzas, but often played whatever occured to him at that moment. This chapter presents an interview with Levin on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and improvisation in music, how character is delineated in concertos, absolute pitch, use of the continuo in Mozart and Joseph Haydn, how improvisation can be translated into the recording studio, and the decline in size of audience for classical music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756. Direct evidence of his urge towards composition comes in the form of early keyboard pieces, which his father Leopold helped him write down. As a performer Mozart was to be best known as a master of the keyboard, but he was also a violinist, and took singing lessons. He sang in public, with a small voice but with perfect taste, until his voice broke during the first visit to Italy when he was fourteen. He learned to understand wind instruments thoroughly, and his writing for them is among the most rewarding in the repertoire. His habit of consulting instrumentalists and singers about their capabilities was probably founded early, during the family's Grand Tour of Western Europe.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of many composers who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thought more and more about a German-language opera. The idea of a German national opera was intensively discussed in Mannheim, and also put into practice with Ignaz Holzbauer's setting of Anton Klein's libretto Günther von Schwarzburg (1777). The idea of the national opera took hold in Europe during the nineteenth century. Is the German national opera, which composers and writers on music from Richard Wagner to Hans Pfitzner see as starting with Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz, a historical reality or a historiographical construct? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes a brief look at the situation of opera around 1800, for only in Germany, and not in the other two leading opera nations, Italy and France, can a development at this time be observed in which the idea of a national opera takes shape.

The form of the Tuba Concerto is nearer to the form of Johann Sebastian Bach than to that of the Viennese School, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, though the first and last movements each finish up with an elaborate cadenza that allies the concerto to the Mozart-Beethoven form. The music is fairly simple and obvious and can probably be listened to without much previous explanation. The orchestration is that of the so-called theatre orchestra consisting of woodwind, two each of horns, trumpets and trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. Tuba concertos started to appear in the middle of the twentieth century, and finally gave lie to the cliché that the tuba was heavy, clumsy, and incapable of playing fast.

Colloredo summoned Mozart to Vienna as a Konzertmeister, composer, and keyboard player, to entertain his guests. Colloredo surely noticed Mozart's interest in exploiting Vienna for his own benefit: for Mozart it was “the land of the Clavier”. Mozart was plotting his escape almost from the moment of arrival. He reviewed the chances of gaining a foothold at court, such as might have satisfied even Leopold, but there were no vacancies. Mozart's insubordinate attitude led the archbishop to fire him in May, but only orally, and his release took a month's negotiation. He worked extremely hard to realise his intention to support himself on a freelance basis. He finished the six violin sonatas published by Artaria in 1781 as Op.2, dedicating them to Josepha Auernhammer. A less homogeneous selection followed, published by Torricella in 1784, containing two B flat sonatas (K. 330=31SC of 1783 for piano, and K. 454 for piano and violin) and the earlier piano sonata in D (K. 284–205b, of 1775). He composed variation sets for violin and piano and for piano alone.

This chapter examines Arthur Schopenhauer's work on the genius of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It discusses his The World as Will and Representation and suggests that the legend of Mozart was fully formed when Schopenhauer adduced Mozart for his illustration of genius as the perpetual child. The chapter also explains that Mozart became the aesthetic symbol of Schopenhauer's Romanticized Platonic genius: the genius not merely as the madman, or the possessed, but as the eternal youth.

Following his resignation from the archbishop's service, Mozart set off, on 23 September 1777 with his mother. Leopold wanted Wolfgang to find a better patron in Germany, within the relatively secure economic and musical world that he himself understood best. At first, Mozart made a real effort to gain employment in Germany, beginning in Munich. While trying to cover expenses by giving a concert and lessons, Mozart cultivated the court to no avail. Mozart eventually moved to Mannheim where he stayed, rather than directing himself through the Rhineland as Leopold intended. The Mozarts reached Paris on 23 March 1778. The intellectual capital of Europe, with a little luck and at another time, might have provided Mozart with a living. But a war of words had begun in 1774 between the supporters of Gluck's reformed opera and those who favoured an authentically Italian style. Idomeneo would eventually show that Mozart could assimilate French as well as Italian elements and adapt the innovations of Gluck to his own more richly musical ends. But in Paris, nobody asked him to try.

Mozart was a famous composer in his own lifetime. This simple assertion needs to be made from time to time, as the story is still told of the hopelessly misunderstood genius, dying in poverty and obscurity, whose reputation soared after his death. The last part is true, and in the romantic 19th century it did him no posthumous harm to have died young. Other than in England, where the honor goes to Handel, Mozart was the first composer to remain permanently lodged in the minds not only of practising musicians but also of the musical public. Scholars continue to research Mozart's life, analyse his music, and try to gain insight into his personality, but the 20th-century response to Mozart may best be measured through his rising popularity.

During 1785 Mozart continued composing at the top of his bent. The Fantasia in C minor (K. 475), a masterpiece of carefully honed “improvisation”, was finished in May for publication with the C-minor sonata (K. 457). In the summer, he wrote a handful of Lieder including Das Veilchen, his best-known song and only setting of Goethe. In October, the piano quartet in G minor (K. 478) achieved mastery of a new medium at a stroke and launched an intermittent but masterful series of chamber works over the next few years. During the winter season of 1785–86, Mozart continued the pattern of previous years by presenting three new concertos, Nos. 22–24 (K. 482, 488, and 491).

This chapter argues that Mozart's music, rather than emerging fully formed from the mind of a genius, is rather the product of much labor throughout the compositional process. In particular, the chapter concerns two instances in which Mozart returned to a work in progress to make substantial revisions. The Sonata in D Major, K. 284, is the last of the set of six sonatas completed by early 1775 at Munich. The reworking of its first movement offers insights into Mozart's evolving stylistic language at a pivotal point in his career. This chapter's second example dates from more than a decade later, in 1786, when Mozart reshaped the piano entrance in the first movement of one of his most imposing works for piano, the Concerto in C Major, K. 503.

The penultimate entry for 1788 in Mozart's catalogue reads “NB: im Monath November Händels Acis und Galathée für Baron Suiten bearbeitet”. Mozart had taken over from the ballet composer Joseph Starzer as musical director for Swieten's enterprise, and Acis was the first Handel arrangement made to suit Viennese taste — one of many activities for which we can only guess at how much Mozart was paid. Messiah followed, for performances in March and April 1789 at the house of Count Johann Baptist Esterházy; Lange and Adamberger were among the soloists. In July 1790, he added arrangements of Dryden's St Cecilia odes, “From Harmony” and “Alexander's Feast”.

Popular anecdotal accounts do not satisfy rigorous scientific standards but can be very useful for cross-historical comparisons of precocious achievements. Fortunately, more objective scientific testing using emerging psychometric methods was developed by Carl Stumpf around 1900. We will review three little known case studies of prodigies (Arriola, Korngold, and Nyiregyházi) who all originated within a scientific network surrounding Stumpf in Berlin. Here, in Europe’s musical capital, many prodigies sought instruction or tried to attract public attention. The three prodigies were not selected for their singularity. Rather, their selection was coincidental and likely due to a combination of circumstances, such as geographical location, the child’s place of residence, and the chance association with a member of the research community. Given this selection bias, we argue that many more precocious musicians remained unknown to the researchers, although they would also have displayed similar prodigious feats.

On 12 December 1769, the male Mozarts set off for Italy, aided by 120 ducats from the court treasury. The Mozarts gave their first concert in Verona at the end of 1769, then travelled on to Milan. The Austrian governor, Count Firmian, a relation of a former archbishop of Salzburg, was particularly supportive, and he commissioned Mozart to write the main opera seria for the next Carnival. The Mozarts moved on to Florence, where Archduke Leopold ruled as governor of Tuscany, and where Mozart formed his brief but close friendship with Thomas Linley; it included playing music together. Mozart returned to Salzburg in March 1773 a recognised maestro, skilled on keyboard and violin, and an experienced composer with the necessary equipment to be a Kapellmeister. But he was barely seventeen, and so unemployable in a capacity where he would have the direction of older, possibly recalcitrant or self-opinionated, musicians.

The family began to enjoy an improved economic situation when Wolfgang's honorary title of Konzertmeister was confirmed by Archbishop Colloredo in 1772, with a salary of 150 gulden. In the autumn of 1773 the Mozarts removed to the Tanzmeisterhaus, an apartment large enough for music-making and playing games, including shooting at targets — occupations for the whole family, whereas the mother was generally not involved in music. In October, Mozart had completed a brace of symphonies in the related keys of B flat and G minor, the latter being the earliest to command a regular place in the modern repertoire. His intensive cultivation of particular instrumental forms (in these years, the symphony and violin concerto) was less a planned exploration of their potential than the fulfilment of the requirements of local concert life. In the long gap between opera commissions, he wrote few arias, but theatre music was never far from his mind.

Cursing the people of Salzburg even in his last letter from Munich in January 1779, Mozart set off for home. He was offered free travel in the coaches of various dignitaries, whose schedules he had to follow. In Salzburg, he found the petition for him to succeed Adlgasser, written by Leopold and awaiting his signature. His appointment was approved in February, with the condition that he compose more music than his predecessor. Composition, a possible means of escape, was also balm to his bruised feelings. During this period he produced his finest works to date in every field he cultivated, not least church music. By March 1779, he had completed the Mass in C, still one of his best-known sacred works, followed a year later by the Missa solemnis in C, his last complete setting of the Ordinary. In each of these years Mozart also supplied the cathedral with full Vesper settings, in duration equivalent to a Mass, and he continued to produce “Epistle sonatas”.

Mozart's central place in the operatic canon rests mainly on three works with libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, thanks to which the privileged position of Viennese opera buffa among late 18th-century repertories remains unchallenged. When he began Figaro, Mozart had not finished an opera buffa for over ten years; his Viennese works belong to a different species. Given their sheer musical and dramatic fascination, their originality is hardly important; such as it is, it lies mainly in the ensembles for which even the quartets in Zaide and Die Entführung provide only a modest precedent. The multimovement finales, among the glory of these operas, use a form older than Mozart himself. Mozart's originality lies more in method than in form, especially in his synchronisation of musical design and action; and his achievement proved surprisingly difficult for later composers to exploit.