Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as found on the World Wide Web

Of all the great composers throughout the years, possibly the most famous ever would be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Few composers ever have led such a remarkable life of left such a remarkable lasting legacy of music in such a short span of life.

Mozart was born in 1756 in Salzburg, Austria. He was the second survivor of six born to an accomplished musician named Leopold (The Symphony pg.1). Mozart was a child prodigy when he began playing the keyboard at just three years old. He began to compose music at four and wrote his first symphony at eight years of age (Mozart). Mozart spent most of his life touring Europe and performing in front of aristocrats until he moved to Vienna in 1782 and wed Constaze Weber (The Symphony pg.2). Although he would only live for nine more years spending the last two with an ill wife and in poverty some of his greatest works would come through the symphonies he composed during this time. He had a glorious childhood career that would eventually as he got older fizzle, as the public would grow tired of him. From there on he would live in poverty until he died in Vienna. Wolfgang would write nearly a thousand works in his lifetime, with the significant ones to include over fifty symphonies, twenty seven piano concertos, and seven of the greatest operas of all time (Mozart). Some say that he was not an original composer because he never actually did invent a form or style, and his work leaned heavily on his predecessors. One can argue though that through his original contributions he changed the forms of the works entirely (Mozart the Modernist pg.2). He had great emotional depth and his symphonies would combine perfect formal symmetry and symphonic design with emotional expressions that would remain unequal until Beethoven and Schubert (Wolfgang). His melodies were always perfectly shaped and designed would come along and he was on the forefront of harmonie innovation (The symphony pg.2). Some say that his complexity in his later symphonies was to blame for his downfall. He began to experiment and write symphonies for his own liking, to satisfy himself instead of the public and this is what would make them loose interest in his work and eventually what would cause his later poverty-stricken years later.

In conclusion: despite, or maybe perhaps because of his originality Mozart's influence took some time to catch on. Only later in the century would his genius be admired by such composers as Johames Brahms and Arnold Schoenberg. Without Mozart's innovation and his ideas of what was possible in particular types of music most music written in the next fifty years or would have been probably written much differently there can be few composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have not felt drawn to some aspect of Mozart's work (Mozart's Legacy).