Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Their life

Austrian composer and child prodigy who produced more than 600 works of astonishing range and grace — symphonies, operas, concertos, and chamber music — before dying at 35. Few creators have combined such natural fluency with such emotional depth.

Known for

• The Marriage of Figaro
• Don Giovanni
• The Magic Flute
• Symphony No. 40 in G minor
• Piano concertos written for himself
• Child prodigy turned working composer

The road they walked

Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, the seventh child of Leopold Mozart, a violinist and composer in the archbishop's court who recognized his son's gifts before the boy could write his own name. By age five he was composing; by six he was touring the courts of Europe with his sister Nannerl, performing for the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna and later for royalty in Paris and London. Leopold managed these tours with an eye for spectacle, and the young Mozart absorbed the musical languages of Italy, France, and Germany firsthand, an education no conservatory could have matched.

The world he grew up in was one of patronage — composers worked for archbishops, princes, and courts, their output shaped by whoever signed the check. Mozart chafed against this arrangement his whole life, particularly under Salzburg's Archbishop Colloredo, who treated him as a servant. In 1781 Mozart broke with Colloredo, famously dismissed with what he described as 'a kick in the arse,' and settled in Vienna as a freelance composer, one of the first of his era to try making a living outside steady court employment. It was a precarious way to live, but it gave him the freedom to write what he wanted.

The Vienna years, roughly 1781 to his death in 1791, produced the works most people now associate with his name: the operas 'The Marriage of Figaro,' 'Don Giovanni,' and 'The Magic Flute,' the late symphonies, the piano concertos he wrote for his own subscription concerts, and chamber music of startling intimacy. He married Constanze Weber in 1782 against his father's wishes, had six children (two survived infancy), and cycled through periods of fashionable success and financial strain. His reputation as history's quintessential prodigy solidified only after his death, as his widow and later biographers shaped the myth of effortless genius — a myth his surviving letters and manuscripts complicate, since they show a composer who revised, calculated, and worked with formidable discipline.

How their story ended

Mozart died in Vienna in December 1791 at age 35, after a short but severe illness marked by fever, swelling, and pain that confined him to bed in his final days. He was working on his Requiem Mass when he died, leaving it unfinished; his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it from his sketches. The exact cause of death has never been settled — historians and physicians have proposed rheumatic fever, kidney failure, and other ailments, while the once-popular poisoning theory is now considered unfounded by most scholars. He was buried in a common grave outside Vienna, per the standard municipal practice of the time, not as a mark of poverty or disgrace as later legend suggested.

In their words

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Tables where Wolfgang sits

The Conservatory

For the discipline and joy of mastering a craft.

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