Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The childhood European tours (1762-1773)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Archbishopric of Salzburg, the seventh and last child (only the second to survive infancy) of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl. Leopold was an accomplished violinist and composer in his own right and the author of an important violin treatise (Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, 1756). He was a meticulous documenter of his children's education.

Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna ("Nannerl") were both musical prodigies. From age 6 Leopold took the children on extended European tours - to Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Netherlands, and Italy - performing for aristocratic and royal audiences. The tours lasted approximately 10 years cumulatively and exposed both children to most of the music being composed in Western Europe at the time.

Wolfgang's documented compositional output starts before his sixth birthday. By age 8 he had written his first symphony (K. 16); by 11 his first opera (Apollo et Hyacinthus, K. 38); by 12 his first sacred mass (K. 49). The pace and complexity of his early output have no clear historical parallel. Leopold's letters home are an unusually detailed primary source for the early career - they document not only the performances but also the audiences, the responses, and the financial arrangements.

The Salzburg court years (1773-1781)

After the European tours Mozart returned to Salzburg in his teens to take up a position as concertmaster (Konzertmeister) of the Archbishop's court orchestra. The Salzburg position was modestly paid and required substantial output of liturgical music for the cathedral and entertainment music for the Archbishop's court. Mozart found the conditions confining and his relationship with the Archbishop deteriorated steadily through the 1770s.

The Salzburg period nonetheless produced substantial work: violin concertos (K. 207, 211, 216, 218, 219), early symphonies, a body of sacred music including the Coronation Mass (K. 317), and the opera Idomeneo (K. 366) which he composed for Munich in 1781. The Idomeneo commission required Mozart to travel to Munich while still nominally employed at Salzburg; the trip became part of the final break with the Archbishop.

In 1781 Mozart was famously dismissed from Salzburg court service - per surviving correspondence, "with a kick on the backside, by order of our worthy Prince Archbishop." He moved to Vienna and remained there for the last decade of his life as a freelance composer, teacher, and performer.

Vienna years and the mature operas (1781-1791)

The Vienna years are the period of Mozart's mature output: the great da Ponte operas (The Marriage of Figaro 1786, Don Giovanni 1787, Così fan tutte 1790), The Magic Flute (1791), the late piano concertos (the c-minor K. 491, the d-minor K. 466, the C-major K. 503), the late symphonies (39, 40, 41 - all composed in summer 1788), the string quartets dedicated to Haydn, the Clarinet Concerto, and the Requiem left unfinished at his death.

Mozart's financial situation through the Vienna years was unstable. He earned substantial income at peak periods - particularly 1784-1786, when he was the most fashionable pianist-composer in Vienna - but his expenses and lifestyle outran his income, and he was chronically in debt to friends including the merchant Michael Puchberg. The popular image of Mozart in a "pauper's grave" is, however, broadly inaccurate; he was buried in a standard middle-class common grave per Viennese custom of the period rather than in a specifically destitute one.

His relationship with Joseph Haydn, the senior Classical-period composer, was an unusual one for the period: a mutual admiration without the standard teacher-pupil hierarchy. Haydn's famous remark to Leopold Mozart in 1785 - "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name" - is among the best-attested contemporary assessments of Mozart's standing.

Death and the Requiem

Mozart died on December 5, 1791, at age 35, in his apartment at Rauhensteingasse in Vienna. The cause of death has been the subject of substantial medical-historical debate. The most common modern retrospective diagnosis is severe acute rheumatic fever with secondary kidney failure; other proposed diagnoses include streptococcal infection, trichinosis, and (rarely) various poisoning theories. The poisoning theories - most famously by Antonio Salieri - have no historical basis and are now considered popular legend rather than serious medical hypothesis.

At his death Mozart was working on the Requiem in D minor (K. 626), commissioned anonymously earlier that year by a Count Franz von Walsegg who intended to pass the work off as his own. The Requiem was incomplete; Mozart had sketched portions of all the major sections but had fully orchestrated only the opening Requiem aeternam and Kyrie. The work was completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, with significant additional input from Joseph Eybler and others.

The completed Requiem is among Mozart's most-performed works. Its precise textual status - how much is Mozart, how much is Süssmayr, how much can be reasonably reconstructed - remains a topic of scholarship. Various 20th-century completions (Beyer, Levin, Maunder, Dutron) have proposed alternative completions, none of which has replaced the Süssmayr version in standard performance.

The Cox-estimate critique and musical-domain measurement

Cox's 1926 study assigned Mozart approximately 155, which placed him in a middle band of her 300-figure sample - well above the population mean but substantially below figures like Mill, Goethe, and Pascal. The ranking has been criticized in the psychometric literature essentially since publication.

The methodological objection is straightforward: Cox's instrument scored verbal-conceptual precocity (learning Greek at 3, calculus at 9, writing Latin verse in childhood) and had no good way to weight musical-compositional precocity. Mozart's K. 16 first symphony, written at 8, and his K. 38 first opera, written at 11, are at the absolute top of the distribution of documented childhood compositional output. By any reasonable musical-domain measure he would rank at the top of any historical sample. Cox's methodology simply could not see this.

The Mozart case is now the standard textbook example of why retrospective IQ estimation from childhood records is methodologically unstable. The procedure encodes the values and the documentation patterns of its own historical moment. A 1926 American educational psychometrician inevitably scored precocity in the verbal-conceptual register her own training had been built on, with no calibration for music or for any other non-verbal domain.

Timeline

• 1756Born in Salzburg, Archbishopric of Salzburg.
• 1762Begins European concert tours with father Leopold and sister Nannerl at age 6.
• 1764Composes Symphony No. 1 (K. 16) at age 8.
• 1767Composes Apollo et Hyacinthus (K. 38), his first opera, at age 11.
• 1773Begins position as concertmaster at the Salzburg court at age 17.
• 1781Dismissed from Salzburg court service; moves to Vienna.
• 1786Premiere of The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492).
• 1787Premiere of Don Giovanni (K. 527).
• 1788Composes Symphonies 39, 40, and 41 in a single summer.
• 1790Premiere of Così fan tutte (K. 588).
• 1791Premiere of The Magic Flute (K. 620). Dies in Vienna on December 5 at age 35.

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