Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born Johannes Chrysostomus
Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; 27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) is among the
most significant and enduring popular composers of European classical
music.Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already
competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and
performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in
Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position,
always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed
from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved
fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he
composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions
of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death.
The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was
survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.His enormous output includes works
that are widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, chamber, piano,
operatic, and choral music. Many of his works are part of the standard concert
repertoire and are widely recognized as masterpieces of classical music. The
central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart’s music.
Clarity, balance, and transparency are hallmarks, though a simplistic notion of
the delicacy of his music obscures for us the exceptional and even demonic
power of some of his finest masterpieces, such as the Piano Concerto No 24 in C
minor, K. 491, the Symphony No 40 in G minor, K. 550, and the opera Don
Giovanni. The famed writer on music Charles Rosen has written (in The Classical
Style): “It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the
center of Mozart’s work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his
structures and an insight into his magnificence. In a paradoxical way,
Schumann’s superficial characterization of the G minor Symphony can help us to
see Mozart’s daemon more steadily. In all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of
suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous.Beethoven
composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote that
"posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."Listen song here:YouTube
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