MOZART

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91)

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91)

Introduction

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91) Austrian composer. One of the most versatile composers in history, Mozart especially prized opera. As a youth he showed himself adept in the conventional genres, Idomeneo (Munich, 1781) being the most accessible of all opera seria. Mozart's greatness is revealed in the operas he wrote to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte. The Marriage of Figaro ( Burgtheater, 1786), still the most revived of all comic operas, has a vitality, pathos, and humanity that intensifies the revolutionary message of Beaumarchais's original. Mozart's masterpiece Don Giovanni (Prague, 1787) is perhaps the only successful tragicomedy in the operatic repertoire; music is used throughout to create an ironic perspective on action and character. Così fan tutte (Burgtheater, 1790) is a searching, ultimately painful comedy on the instability of sexual desire. His two operas in the style of the Singspiel, The Abduction from the Seraglio (Burgtheater, 1782) and the well-loved The Magic Flute (Vienna, 1791), demonstrated his capacity to write in the popular styles of his time. Although Mozart's operas are divided into separate musical numbers linked by recitative, the extended finales to the acts of his mature work did much to develop music as a continuous dramatic language. This paper discusses the life of Mozart and his musical background.

Discussion

Mozart is one of the most famous composers of the 18th century. He displayed his musical talent as a young child and wrote hundreds of pieces of music of many different forms. He was a principal composer of the classical period and of all time; b. Salzburg, Austria, Jan. 27, 1756 (baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus); d. Vienna, Dec. 5, 1791.

Mozart's father, Leopold, had been a respected composer and violinist in the employ of the archi-episcopal court of Salzburg. As a small boy, Mozart already displayed amazing talents as violinist and harpsichordist, even as composer. In 1769 he entered Archbishop Colloredo's service. There, he had frequent opportunities for writing sacred music, yet he resented increasingly the confining environment of a small ecclesiastical state, and this resentment was aggravated by travels to important musical centers throughout Europe. The inevitable break between the archbishop and the young musician occurred in 1781. Mozart then settled in Vienna, always hoping for a desirable court position. As late as 1790 he applied for an appointment to the Austrian court, stating in his application that "from my childhood on I have been familiar with the church style." The desired appointment did not materialize. That Mozart wrote virtually no sacred music after leaving Salzburg is attributed in part to this failure, but also to the curtailment of church music during the age of Josephinism. (Till, 2008)

Mozart was essentially a believing and practicing Catholic, as seems certain from many of his letters (Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Life, His Work 77-81). He saw no conflict between his religious beliefs and Free-masonry in which he became involved in 1784, taking an active part in its affairs and providing a number of compositions for ...