- Anderson, Emily (1938) The Letters of Mozart and His Family. Currently in print with Palgrave Macmillan (1989)
- Deutsch, Otto Erich (1965) Mozart: A Documentary Biography. English translation by Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. This work contains English translations of all of the documents cited above.
- Solomon, Maynard (1996) Mozart: A Life. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0060926929
Otto Erich Deutsch, who studied all available letters and documents about the composer, arrived at the following conclusion about what the composer called himself: “In Italy, from 1770, Mozart called himself “Wolfgango Amadeo”, and from about 1777, “Wolfgang Amadè”.
The use of multiple language versions of the same name was perhaps common for composers in Mozart’s day. Joseph Haydn went by “Joseph” (English and French), “Josef” (German), and “Giuseppe” (Italian); and Ludwig van Beethoven likewise published as “Luigi” (Italian) and as “Louis” (French).
Mozart’s preference for “Wolfgang Amadè” can be seen on the wedding contract for his marriage to Konstanze Weber, dated August 3, 1782, where the composer’s signature is “Wolfgang Amade Mozart”. In the parish register entry for the marriage, dated August 4, Mozart is oddly referred to as “Herr Wolfgang Adam Mozart”, perhaps a bureaucratic error caused by the unfamiliarity of the name “Amadè”. Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon has developed a number of speculations on the meaning of “Adam”, under the assumption that its appearance is deliberate.
Mozart’s preference for “Amadè” was not in general respected by others. Frequently, he was called either “Wolfgang Amadeus” or “Wolfgang Gottlieb”, “Gottlieb” being yet another translation (German) of “Theophilus”. Here are examples, all dating from shortly after Mozart’s death.
- In a letter dated December 11, 1791, Mozart’s widow Konstanze, in severe financial straits, asked to be given a pension by the Emperor (the appeal was ultimately successful). She signed herself “Konstantia Mozart, née Weber, widow relict of the late Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Imperial officials, replying to her request, used the same name.
- The parish register that recorded Mozart’s death gave his name as “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”.
- A benefit concert for Mozart’s family was held in Prague on December 28, 1791, billed as “Concert in memory of Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart”.
Mozart was baptized January 28, 1756, the day after his birth, at St. Rupert’s Cathedral in Salzburg as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. The baptismal register of the cathedral parish contains the entry shown below, written down in Latin by city chaplain Leopold Lamprecht. The parallel five-column format of the original document is rendered here as five consecutive paragraphs. Material in brackets represents editorial additions by Otto Erich Deutsch (see below), intended for clarification.
- Januarius. 28. med[ia hora] 11. merid[iana] baptizatus est : natus pridie h[ora] 8. vesp[ertina]
- Joannes Chrysost[omus] Wolfgangus Theophilus fil[ius] leg[itimus]
- Nob[ilis] D[ominus] Leopoldus Mozart Aulae Musicus, et Maria Anna Pertlin coniuges
- Nob[ilis] D[ominus] Joannes Theophilus Pergmayr Senator et Mercator Civicus p[ro] t[empore] sponsus
- Idem [Leopoldus Lamprecht Capellanus Civicus]]
Mozart’s first two baptismal names, “Joannes Chrysostomus,” represent his saint’s name, following the custom of the Roman Catholic Church. They result from the fact that his birthday, 27 January, was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom. The document also records that Mozart was of legitimate birth and gives the names of his parents and his father Leopold’s occupation as court musician. The first paragraph indicates that the baptism took place at 10:30 in the morning, and that Mozart had been born at 8:00 the night before.
Here are the details of the various names given on the register:
- “Wolfgangus” is “Wolfgang”, adapted to the Latin used in the parish register. The composer used “Wolfgang” in German-speaking contexts. “Wolfgang” was the name of the composer’s maternal grandfather.
- “Theophilus” comes from Greek and is variously rendered as “lover of God” or “loved by God”. The familiar form “Amadeus” is the Latin version of this name. “Theophilus” was a name of Mozart’s godfather, the merchant Joannes Theophilus Pergmayr, whose presence is recorded in the fourth paragraph.
- The baptismal name “Joannes Chrysostomus” was in conformance to Catholic custom and was not used by Mozart in everyday life.
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Ludwig Köchel was a writer, composer, botanist and publisher. He studied law in Vienna and was the tutor for 15 years of the four sons of Archduke Charles. His reward for this was a knighthood (hence “Ritter”) and an excellent pension that allowed him the freedom to become a private researcher and scholar. At first, this manifested itself in geology, mineralogy and botany, the latter of which resulted in several well-received studies on areas such as Russia, North Africa, Spain and Great Britain. |
| However, in addition to botany, he was also loved music, and this lead to his personal discovery of Mozart’s music, and the lack of any clear-cut catalogue of the works of this master. To this time, such efforts had been incomplete at best, or worse, incorrect AND incomplete, sometimes painfully so. Becoming a member of the Mozarteum not long after it’s founding, he determined to rectify the obvious lack of a correct listing of the true, complete works of Mozart. Inspired by the on-going publication by the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel of Otto Jahn’s magnificent four-volume biography of Mozart (publishing ran from 1856-59), Köchel agreed with these publishers to research and produce a complete catalogue of all of Mozart’s works.Mozart’s work had gone through several cataloguers, beginning with Abbe Maximilian Stadler (who was assisted by Constanze’s second husband, Georg Nikolaus von Nissen), furthered by Joseph Haydn and Johann Anton Andre’, as well as Breitkopf & Härtel themselves early on. To be truthful, it may not have been possible before this time to produce such an accurate work. Many manuscripts and facsimiles had been temporarily lost or neglected, and previous chroniclers simply did not have the resources to pursue such a daunting task, the breadth of which could only be guessed at. Certainly no previous attempt had the talent and abilities Köchel brought to the task. Finally the magisterial work was published in1862 as: Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts, a chronological and thematic register of the works of Mozart. It is known informally today as “the Köchel catalogue”. This catalogue was the first on such a scale and with such a level of scholarship behind it. Köchel arranged this opus such that the works were placed in chronological order, but the dates of many of the pieces that were written prior to1784 had to be literally guessed at. Mozart’s own work catalogue was started by him in 1784, but even here a few works were not entered by Wolfgang and needed to be analyzed and assigned positions within the whole. Subsequent editions, especially the third by Alfred Einstein (K3, 1937), and the sixth by Franz Giegling, Gerd Sievers and Alexander Weinmann (K6, 1964, the most recent), included many corrections.
The Köchel catalogue is set-up to include the opening bars of each piece (if available, as some works are lost) and give each musical work a specific identification number, set in the (believed) order Mozart composed them in. These numbers, known as the K number, refer to Mozart’s works today; for example, the Symphony No. 41 in C major (the “Jupiter” symphony) is K.551. As well, there is a short description of the work and a listing of authoritative writings by others about the work in question. Köchel also arranged Mozart’s works into 24 categories that were used by Breitkopf & Härtel when they published the first complete edition of Mozart’s works 1877-1905 in 50 sets (a venture funded in part initially by Köchel himself). Since the first edition, there have been a total eight editions of Köchel’s work issued. Only two others are significant: the third edition, revised by Alfred Einstein in 1936 (K3); and the sixth, edited in 1964 by Franz Giegling, Alexander Weinmann and Gerd Sievers (K6). The latter, especially, incorporated many newly discovered works and revised the dates assigned to many of the compositions previously. In updating the catalog, the quandary editors faced was that Köchel’s 1st edition (now K1) numbers had become integrated into virtually every document related to Mozart, including books, newly printed score and all concert programs and recordings. So, even though modern research and scholarship could correct the dates of the many compositions requiring revision, “tradition” would not allow the catalog numbers to be merely rearranged. Though, in the end, a decision to do so early on would no doubt have eased the headache one associates with the present system. The problem however, was “solved” by appending lowercase (and, later, uppercase) letters to the original numbers. This allowed new designations to be placed between the standard older ones. For one example, Mozart’s Missa solemnis in c minor, “Waisenhausmesse”, originally designated K.139 in K1, became K.114a (between K.114 and K.115) in Einstein’s edition (K3), and K.47a (between K.47 and K.48) in K6. Obviously, this path provides a solution, but it can be confusing to newcomers as well as old hands. After all, it’s much cleaner and simpler to refer to Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony in D from 1778 as K.297 (K1) rather than as K.300a (K6). Also, don’t forget that K.417B is not the same work as K.417b, either. Because of this, many modern publications have adopted one of two courses. The first is to follow Köchel’s original scheme whenever possible and use later designations only for works that have been discovered (or reconstructed or re-evaluated) after 1862. The second path is to list after the title the main numbers in order that have been assigned to the work. So, the “Paris” Symphony might be seen as K.297/300a. Even then there are those Köchel works that have been assigned with four different numbers over the years. In such a case, publications generally use the identification numbers from the first Köchel version assigning a number, and then the latest K number. |
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Salzburg (population 135,000 in 2005) is a city in western Austria and the capital of the federal state of Salzburg (population 520,000 in 2003). The birthplace of Mozart at 9 Getriedegasse, Salzburg, Austria on January 27th 1756. |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the most famous Austrian of all time. 2006 marks the 250th anniversary of his birth and Austria will be honoring this musical genius with a rich and varied calendar of events.
New museums, attention-getting operatic performances and extraordinary concert series, festivals and galas, expos, special exhibitions and discussion forums - the entire year of 2006 will revolve around our beloved, one-of-a-kind musician - in Salzburg, in Vienna and everywhere else where his legacy lives on.
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Mozart is unusual among composers for being the subject of an abundance of legend, much due to the problem that none of his early biographers knew him personally. They often resorted to fiction in order to produce a work. Many myths began soon after Mozart died, but few have any basis in fact. An example is the story that Mozart composed his Requiem with the belief it was for himself. |
| Sorting out fabrications from real events is a vexing and continuous task for Mozart scholars mainly because of the prevalence of legend in scholarship. Dramatists and screenwriters, free from responsibilities of scholarship, have found excellent material among these legends.� �An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, and, in some versions, the tale that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart’s death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri, and Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. The last of these has been made into a feature-length film of the same name, which won eight Oscars. Shaffer’s play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated.According to an essay by A. Peter Brown, “the Mozart mania of the 1980s was initiated by Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. It and the subsequent film directed by MiloÅ¡ Forman did more for Mozart’s case than anything else in the two hundred years since the composer’s death.” The same could be said of the popular myths currently surrounding Mozart, many of which are firmly rooted in the film.
However, Shaffer and Forman have never claimed that Amadeus was based in fact, as pointed out by Shaffer himself: “From the start we agreed on one thing: we were not making an objective Life of Wolfgang Mozart. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film is even less of one.” Shaffer and Forman are equally quick to defend elements of the film which they believe are accurate but are disputed by Mozart historians. Shaffer has detailed in many interviews, including one featured as an extra on the DVD release of the film, how the dramatic narrative was inspired by the biblical story of Cain and Abel—one brother loved by God, and the other scorned. Transcribed as creative rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, the notion of divine blessing and murderous jealousy provides the basic premise for Amadeus, although there is no historical evidence of any rivalry between the two composers. Conversely, it is well documented that Salieri frequently lent Mozart musical scores from the court library, and Mozart selected Salieri to teach his son, Franz Xaver. One of the more detailed essays on the “dramatic licenses” present in Amadeus is written by Gregory Allen Robbins, titled “Mozart & Salieri, Cain & Abel: A Cinematic Transformation of Genesis 4″. Another area of debate involves Mozart’s prodigy as a composer from childhood until his death. While some have criticised many of his earlier works as simplistic or forgettable, others revere even Mozart’s juvenilia. The image of Mozart as the divinely inspired effortless creator, popularized by the film Amadeus, is generally believed to be an exaggeration. Quite the contrary, Mozart was a studiously hard worker, and by his own admission his extensive knowledge and abilities developed out of many years’ close study of the European musical tradition. It has been speculated that Mozart suffered from Tourette syndrome. Letters he wrote to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla (”Bäsle”) between 1777 and 1781 contain scatological language and he wrote canons titled Leck mich im Arsch (”Lick my ass”) or variations thereof (including the pseudo-Latin Difficile lectu mihi mars). Since 1902, the Mozarteum in Salzburg has preserved a controversial “Mozart’s skull”. Genetic analysis revealed in January 2006 could not prove that this skull was related to the bones exhumed from the Mozart’s family plot in St. Sebastian Cemetery. However, the same tests could not prove those bones even to be related to each other, so the mystery remains. |
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In the decades after Mozart’s death there were several attempts to catalogue his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel succeeded in this enterprise. Many of his famous works are referred to by their Köchel catalogue number; for example, the Piano Concerto in A major (Piano Concerto No. 23) is often referred to simply as “K.488″ or “KV.488″. The catalogue has undergone six revisions.
Many important composers since Mozart’s time have worshipped or at least been in awe of Mozart. Rossini averred, “He is the only musician who had as much knowledge as genius, and as much genius as knowledge.” Beethoven’s admiration for Mozart is clear: Beethoven used Mozart as a model a number of times: Beethoven’s A-major Quartet from Op. 18 makes careful use of Mozart’s Quartet in A K. 464. Beethoven even copied out most of the Mozart quartet before he wrote his own A-major quartet, just to figure out how Mozart put the music together. A plausible story–not corroborated–has one of Beethoven’s students looking through a pile of music in Beethoven’s apartment. The student pulls out the Mozart A-major Quartet, Beethoven notices, and says, “Ah, that piece. That’s Mozart saying ‘here’s what I could do, if only you had ears to hear!’”; Beethoven’s own Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor is an obvious tribute to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, and yet another plausible–if unconfirmed–story has Beethoven at a concert with his sometime-student Ries. They’re listening to Mozart’s C-minor concerto Piano Concerto No. 24. The coda of the last movement is quite unusual, for various reasons, and when it arrives, Beethoven supposedly says to Ries “We’ll never think of anything like that!” Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds is another obvious tribute to Mozart, similar to Mozart’s own Quintet of the same kind. Beethoven also paid homage to Mozart by writing sets of variations on several of his themes: for example, the two sets of variations for cello and piano on themes from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and cadenzas to several of Mozart’s piano concertos, most notably the Piano Concerto No. 20, K466 (see below for this system and an explanation). After the only meeting between the two composers, Mozart noted that Beethoven would “give the world something to talk about.” As well, Tchaikovsky wrote his Mozartiana in praise of him; and Mahler died with the name “Mozart” on his lips. The variations theme of the opening movement of the A major piano sonata (K331) was used by Max Reger for his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart, written in 1914 and among his best-known works in turn.
Mozart, along with Haydn and Beethoven, was a central representative of the classical style. His works spanned the period during which that style transformed from a predominantly simple musical language, as exemplified by the stile galant of his contemporaries such as Sammartini and Johann Stamitz, to a mature style which began to incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque, complexities against which the galant style was a reaction. Mozart’s own stylistic development closely paralleled the maturing of the classical style as a whole. In addition, he was a prolific composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintets, and the keyboard sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. Mozart also wrote a great deal of religious music including masses. He also composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment.
The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart’s music. Clarity, balance, transparency, and uncomplicated harmonic language are his hallmark, although in his later works he explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. Mozart is commonly named along with Schubert as having a gift for pure, simple, and memorable melody, and to many listeners this is his most definitive characteristic.
From his earliest life Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard; since he travelled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language. When he went to London as a child, he met J.C. Bach and heard his music; when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra; when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and the opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other chords, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Some of Mozart’s early symphonies are essentially Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other; many are “homotonal” (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the tonic minor). Others mimic the works of J.C. Bach, and others show the simple, rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna.
As Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some features of the abandoned Baroque styles into his music. For example, the Symphony No. 29 in A Major K. 201, uses a contrapuntal main theme; in addition, in it he began to experiment with irregular phrase lengths, something a galant composer such as Sammartini never did. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who had just published his opus 20 set. The influence of the Sturm und Drang (”Storm and Stress”) period in German literature, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers at that time.
In Mozart’s hands, sonata form transformed from the binary models of the Baroque into the fully mature form of his later works, with a multiple-theme exposition, extended, chromatic and contrapuntal development, recapitulation of all themes in the tonic key, and coda.
Throughout his life Mozart switched his focus from writing instrumental music to writing operas, and back again. He wrote operas in each style current in Europe: opera buffa, such as The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte; opera seria, such as Idomeneo or Don Giovanni; and Singspiel, of which Die Zauberflöte is probably the most famous example by any composer. In his later operas, he developed the use of subtle and slight changes of instrumentation, orchestration, and tone colour to express or highlight psychological or emotional states and dramatic shifts. Here his advances in opera and instrumental composing interacted upon one another. The increasing sophistication of his use of the orchestra in his symphonies and concerti served as a resource in his operatic orchestration, and his developing subtlety in using the orchestra to psychological effect in his operas was reflected in his later non-operatic compositions.