Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in January 1756, the younger of two surviving children of Leopold Mozart, Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishop. From the age of six his father took him and his sister Nannerl on extended European concert tours that lasted, on and off, for over a decade — to Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Italian opera houses. He composed continuously from these years onwards; the first symphony dates from 1764, the first opera (*La finta semplice*) from 1768.

His mature output, produced largely in Vienna after he settled there in 1781, covers virtually every musical form of his time. The mature operas — *Le nozze di Figaro* (1786), *Don Giovanni* (1787), *Così fan tutte* (1790), *Die Zauberflöte* (1791), *La clemenza di Tito* (1791) — set the standard for the dramatic possibilities of the form. The last three symphonies (Nos. 39–41) of 1788, the piano concertos of the Vienna years, the late string quartets and quintets, and the unfinished *Requiem* mark a creative concentration that historians have continued to find difficult to account for.

Mozart died in Vienna in December 1791, aged thirty-five, of an illness whose precise nature has been debated continuously since. His burial in a common grave at St Marx Cemetery was standard Viennese practice for someone of his social standing. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his operatic and concert work.