German Classical Music

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in the Austrian town of Salzburg. His father Leopold (1719–1787) worked in the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, was a composer and music teacher. When young Mozart was four, his father began to teach him the piano. At the age of five, the boy already composed little pieces, which his father wrote down.

Shortly after, the child prodigy learned playing the violin and performed before European royalty. In the following years he mastered his composing skills and created over 600 musical pieces, including symphonies, concertos, operas, and the famous Requiem.

The Austrian composer was one of the most prominent figures in the Classical Period; he wrote most of the musical forms of the time, especially opera, symphony, concerts and chamber music. His imagination was extremely vivid and he took advantage of this in original ways, such as when he experimented the progressions in dice throwing or in billiard games, or tried placing musicians in adjoining rooms and making them play each others' echo ("Serenata notturna", K239), or the code of Masonic works in his opera The Magic Flute.

Mozart's emotive range was impressive, and could reach terrible depths such as in the Requiem, K. 626 -written on his deathbed- or the sweetness of the arias of his operas. Many of the structures of his symphonies were copies of the innovations introduced by Haydn, but the surprising modulations and memorable melodies are pure Mozart.