Mozart Wolfgang Gottlieb

Mozart

Mozart was born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on January 27th in the year 1756 in Salzburg. He was baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.

Mozart most commonly called himself Wolfgang Gottlieb. Mozart’s father Leopold came from a family of good standing, which included architects and book binders. Leopold was the author of a famous violin playing manual which was published the same year his son was born. His mother Anna Maria was born into a middle class family who were very involved in local administration. Mozart and his sister were the only two out of seven children to survive.

Mozart had a talent for music from an early age. At three he started playing the harp. At four he started playing short pieces. At five he was composing. There are anecdotes about his precise memory of pitches, about his scribbling a concerto at age five and about his gentle and sensitiveness (he was afraid of the trumpet). Just before he was six his father took him and his sister also highly talented, to Munich to play at the Bavarian Court, and a few months later they went to Vienna and were heard at the Imperial Court and in noble houses.

“The miracle in which God let be born in Salzburg” was Leopold's description of his son. He was very conscious of his duty to God,as he saw it, drew the miracle to the notice of the world.

The children went on a tour to Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Mainz, Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris returning through the Hague, Amsterdam, Paris, Lyon and Switzerland. Arriving back in Salzburg in November 1766. In most of these cities mozart and often his sister would play and improvise, sometimes at court, sometimes in public or in a church.

After little more than nine months in Salzburg the Mozarts set out for Vienna in September 1767, where they spent 15 months. Mozart wrote a one act German singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, which was given privately.

Greater hopes were attached to his dream of having an Italian opera, La Finta Semplice translated “The Feigned Simpleton”. finished at the court theater hopes were frustrated, much to Leopold’s determination. Substantial mass setting was successfully given before the court at the dedication of the Orphanage Church. La Finta Semplice was given the following year, 1769, to the archbishop in his palace in Salzburg. In October Mozart was appointed an honorary musician at the Salzburg court.

Still only 13, Mozart had by now acquired considerable understanding in the musical language of his time, and he was especially good at imitating the musical equivalent of local dialects. The early Paris and London sonatas, the autographs of which include Leopold’s helping hand, show a childlike pleasure in patterns of notes and textures. The London and the Hague symphonies attest to his quick and inventive response to the music he had encountered. Their texture and better development, as those he had performed in Vienna. His first Italian opera shows the buffo style.

Mastery of the Italian opera style was a header for a successful international composing career, and the Austrian political world over Northern Italy ensured that doors would be open there too

This time Mozart’s mother and sister remained at home. Family and friends provide a full account of events. The first tour begun on December 13, 1769, and lasting 15 months, took them to all the main musical centers, but as usual they stopped at any town where a concert could be given or a nobleman might want to hear Mozart play. In Verona, Mozart was put through tough tests at the Accademia Filarmonica and in Milan. After tests of his capacities in dramatic music, he was hired to write the first opera for the carnival season. After a stop in Bologna, where they met the theorist Giovanni Batista Martina, they proceeded to Florence and on to Rome for holy week. There Mozart heard the Sistine Choir in the famous miserere of Gregorio Allegri, which was considered the choir’s but Mozart copied out from memory.

They spent six weeks in Naples returning through Rome, Mozart had a holy audience and was made a knight of the Order of the Golden Spur. They spent the summer near Bologna, where Mozart