A biography on mozart

With the substantial returns from concerts and publishing, he and Constanze enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They lived in one of the more exclusive apartment buildings of Vienna, sent their son, Karl Thomas, to an expensive boarding school, kept servants, and maintained a busy social life. In , Mozart and Constanze traveled to Salzburg to visit his father and sister.

The visit was somewhat cool, as Leopold was still a reluctant father-in-law and Nannerl was a dutiful daughter. But the stay promoted Mozart to begin writing a mass in C Minor, of which only the first two sections, "Kyrie" and "Gloria," were completed. In , Mozart became a Freemason, a fraternal order focused on charitable work, moral uprightness, and the development of fraternal friendship.

Mozart was well regarded in the Freemason community, attending meetings and being involved in various functions. From to , Mozart divided his time between self-produced concerts as soloist, presenting three to four new piano concertos in each season. Theater space for rent in Vienna was sometimes hard to come by, so Mozart booked himself in unconventional venues such as large rooms in apartment buildings and ballrooms of expensive restaurants.

During one five-week period, he appeared in 22 concerts, including five he produced and performed as the soloist. In a typical concert, he would play a selection of existing and improvisational pieces and his various piano concertos.

A biography on mozart

Other times he would conduct performances of his symphonies. Despite his success as a pianist and composer, Mozart was falling into serious financial difficulties. Mozart associated himself with aristocratic Europeans and felt he should live like one. He figured that the best way to attain a more stable and lucrative income would be through court appointment.

Letters written between Mozart and his father, Leopold, indicate that the two felt a rivalry for and mistrust of the Italian musicians in general and Salieri in particular. But in truth, there is no basis for this speculation. Though both composers were often in contention for the same job and public attention, there is little evidence that their relationship was anything beyond a typical professional rivalry.

Toward the end of , Mozart met the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Venetian composer and poet and together they collaborated on the opera The Marriage of Figaro. It received a successful premiere in Vienna in and was even more warmly received in Prague later that year. This triumph led to a second collaboration with Da Ponte on the opera Don Giovanni which premiered in to high acclaim in Prague.

Both compositions feature the wicked nobleman, though Figaro is presented more in comedy and portrays strong social tension. Perhaps the central achievement of both operas lies in their ensembles with their close link between music and dramatic meaning. The gesture was as much an honor bestowed on Mozart as it was an incentive to keep the esteemed composer from leaving Vienna for greener pastures.

It was a part-time appointment with low pay, but it required Mozart only to compose dances for the annual balls. The modest income was a welcome windfall for Mozart, who was struggling with debt, and provided him the freedom to explore more of his personal musical ambitions. He was performing less and his income shrank. Austria was at war and both the affluence of the nation and the ability of the aristocracy to support the arts had declined.

By mid, Mozart moved his family from central Vienna to the suburb of Alsergrund, for what would seem to be a way of reducing living costs. But in reality, his family expenses remained high and the new dwelling only provided more room. Mozart began to borrow money from friends, though he was almost always able to promptly repay when a commission or concert came his way.

During this time he wrote his last three symphonies and the last of the three Da Ponte operas, Cosi Fan Tutte , which premiered in His mother died there. Mozart wrote some small operas when he was young, but his first really important opera was Idomeneo. It was first performed in Munich in The next year he went to Vienna. By this time he was working, like his father, for the Archbishop of Salzburg.

When he went back to Salzburg he argued with the Archbishop. The Archbishop kicked him out for this. Mozart went off to Vienna. He would spend the rest of his life there. In , he married Constanze Weber. She was one of the three younger sisters of Aloysia who by now was married to someone else. They had seven children, but five of them died in childhood.

Constanze was a loving wife, but, like Mozart, she was not good at looking after money so they were often very poor. There is a famous story about the first performance of the opera. The story is about a short conversation between emperor Joseph II and Mozart. Mozart started many concerts in which he played his own piano concertos. He composed these concertos himself and conducted from the keyboard.

Mozart's piano concertos are still very popular today. He wrote 27 piano concertos. All the concertos have a number to know which is which. Popular piano concertos are numbers Nos. Many of the concertos are some of Mozart's best works. He met the composer Joseph Haydn and the two men became great friends. They often played together in a string quartet.

Haydn said to Leopold Mozart one day: "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. He has taste, and what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition. This meant the two were part of a group with similar interests. Mozart dedicated six string quartets to Haydn.

They are called the "Haydn" Quartets. There are two famous "Haydn" Quartets. One of them is called the "Hunt" and the other is called "Dissonance. In his later years, Mozart was earning less money than before. Aristocrats could not support him with money. The reason was because there was a war. The audiences in Vienna did not give Mozart much support after a few years.

That is why he often went to Prague where the audiences loved him. His opera The Marriage of Figaro was very popular. In , he gave the first performance there of his opera Don Giovanni. He was working on an opera The Magic Flute. It is one of his best works and a very popular opera today. It is written in German , not Italian , like most of his other operas.

Post-marriage, some of Mozart's best started to appear -the Haffner and Linz symphonies and five string quartets, for example. Between and , he composed nine piano concertos and three of these concurrently with The Marriage of Figaro. The year saw the premiere of Mozart's second opera, Don Giovanni. His health began to fail and his work rate slowed in He got better, though, and in alone composed the most famous The Magic Flute, the Requiem unfinished , and the Clarinet Concerto.

Mozart did not live long enough to complete his Requiem. He died in Vienna, in , before his 36th birthday. Careful contextual readings of [Mozart's] Viennese letters have been few, perhaps because Mozart is such a towering figure that most historians and musicians have tended to see him as the sun around which all else revolved, and they have therefore paid little attention to the mundane contexts in which he lived, composed, and corresponded.

Mozart was, of course, a supreme musical genius, Thus my readings of his letters and those of his family will often deal with quite mundane contextual matters, such as days of the week, exchange rates, and current events. Often enough, we shall find that the implications of such simple matters have been overlooked. In connection with this effort to understand the context of Mozart's life, Edge approvingly cites the work of Halliwell as well as studies by Michael Lorenz.

Another trend in modern Mozart biography is to reject certain earlier claims as credulous and romanticized. The older tradition of scholarship is criticized by David J. Buch thus:. The composer's deification in the pantheon of German 'masters' following his death, and his subsequent association with burgeoning German national identity, led to hagiography.

When the holes in Mozart's biography needed plugging, rumor and imagination filled the gaps. A possible instance of romanticizing is the belief that Mozart wrote his last symphonies not with the goal of performances and income, but as an "appeal to eternity" Alfred Einstein ; [ 13 ] a claim that has been argued against by Neal Zaslaw on factual grounds; for detailed discussion see Symphony No.

Recent scholarship has also shown an increased reluctance to take historical documents at face value when their author had strong reasons to deviate from the truth. For instance, Constanze Mozart had strong motivation to paint a tragic picture of her husband's final decline and demise, since she was seeking both a pension from the Emperor and income from memorial benefit concerts.

Cliff Eisen , inserting footnotes in Hermann Abert's book, expresses sharp skepticism about Constanze's account of the end of Mozart's life, contradicting the more credulous view of Abert; for details see Death of Mozart. The content of Mozart's letters also receives a very different interpretation under the view that they often reflect a desire to placate, and reduce the alarm of, his stern father Leopold ; this view is put forth, for instance, by Schroeder Revisionism is, perhaps, likely to continue.

Assessing the whole tradition of Mozart biography, Andrew Steptoe concludes:. There is little doubt that successive generations of scholars have been sincere in their views of the composer, each claiming to be more 'objective' than the last, stripping away the veneer of speculation to arrive at 'the real man'. It is sobering to realize that these different opinions about Mozart as a person are all based on a very similar set of data.

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