MOZART, WOLFGANG AMADEUS ( b. Salzburg, Austria, Jan 27 1756;
d. Vienna, Dec 5 1791 )
Mozart is possibly unique among the great figures of western music. He founded no school; he summed none up. His music is archetypal of his time. Countless inferior composers sound superficially like him. One critic has said ΓÇ£if he found the concerto as brick he left it as marbleΓÇ¥. He worked that kind of magic on every musical form and genre he touched.
Having learned the piano at the age of three, and composed his first minuet at five, he toured Europe as a child prodigy, demonstrating his proficiency as a performer. Later he held positions both as a court musician and a teacher, constantly dogged by poverty and his family's ill-health. His creativity was extraordinary and his own intelligent interest in his work is fluently expressed in letters to his father, also a musician.
Barely a handful of composers from Monteverdi and Purcell to Handel and Gluck had proceeded him in opera. He was greatly excited by the theatre and loved to work closely with singers. In hindsight it can be seen that his operas prefigure Wagnerian music drama, while observing the conventions and influences inherited from the Italian opera of his own time.
His four late masterpieces, three of which have libretti by Da Ponte, are still the most beloved in the opera repertoire. Le Nozze di Figaro ( The Marriage of Figaro), (1786) based on Beaumarchais' play, was followed by Don Giovanni, (1787) and Cosi fan tutte (Thus do they all) (1790). Die Zauberfl├╢te, (1791), his strangest work, was written to a libretto by the actor Schikaneder, who sang the part of Papageno in the first production.
Mozart has been compared to Shakespeare in the breadth of his humanity and creativity; and in his ability to encompass universal concepts in individual situations, minutely, but never maliciously observed.
