A Childhood Spent on the Road
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born at Salzburg in January 1756 into a household organised around music. His father Leopold was a violinist and the author of a respected treatise on violin playing, and his elder sister Maria Anna, called Nannerl, was a keyboard prodigy in her own right. From 1763 Leopold took both children on a grand tour that lasted more than three years and reached Munich, Paris and London. The children were displayed as marvels, playing covered keyboards and improvising on themes supplied by aristocratic audiences.
The tours were an education and an exploitation at once. Wolfgang met Johann Christian Bach in London and absorbed the Italian manner in Milan, and the family earned well. The children were also repeatedly ill, and the travelling continued regardless. Nannerl's part in the story ended when she reached marriageable age and was returned to Salzburg, her performing career closed by convention rather than by ability. Whatever her brother became, the household contained two prodigies and made room for only one of them.
Vienna and the Freelance Gamble
In 1781 Mozart broke with Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg in a quarrel that ended with a court official physically ejecting him. He settled in Vienna without a secure post and assembled an income from teaching, publishing and subscription concerts at which he performed his own piano concertos. For several years the gamble worked. He married Constanze Weber in 1782, earned sums that placed him among the better-paid musicians of the city, and composed at a pace that still looks implausible on paper.
His collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte produced The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787 and Cosi fan tutte in 1790, works that treat servants, seducers and fiancees as equally complicated people. Yet his position never became secure. War with the Ottomans thinned the aristocratic audience, subscription concerts dried up, and letters to his fellow freemason Michael Puchberg record repeated requests for loans. He was not destitute, but he was badly overextended, and the margin had grown thin.
The Requiem and the Myths
In 1791 an anonymous commission arrived for a requiem mass. The patron was later identified as Count Franz von Walsegg, who intended to present the work as his own memorial for his wife. Mozart laboured on it while completing The Magic Flute and an opera for Prague, and he died on 5 December 1791, aged thirty-five, leaving the score unfinished. Constanze needed the fee. She turned first to Joseph Eybler and then to Franz Xaver Sussmayr, who supplied the missing movements and the orchestration now generally performed.
Almost everything else the public knows about that December is legend. Antonio Salieri did not poison him; the story grew from rumour, was dramatised in the nineteenth century and again on stage and screen in the twentieth, and rests on no evidence. Nor was the common grave a mark of disgrace, but standard practice under burial reforms introduced by Joseph the Second to discourage costly funerals. The cause of death remains disputed, with rheumatic fever and streptococcal infection among the leading medical proposals.
