Mozart, who wrote some of the world’s most beautiful music, is about to have a birthday. On January 27 he will be 267 years old. Or would be if he were alive. He died in 1791.In his name, the z has a ts sound, so Mozart rhymes with ‘notes art’.
We say Mozart, and everyone knows who we mean. His full name, though, is Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. When he grew up, he was known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Where did the name Amadeus come from? From Theophilus, a Greek name meaning ‘loved by God.’ In Latin, it’s ‘Amadeus.’Today, he is referred to as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or simply as Mozart, instead of by his super-long birth name.He was born in 1756 in the city of Salzburg (in a country that today is called Austria) . His parents were Leopold and Anna Marie Mozart. He was the youngest of seven children, but five of them died, leaving only baby Wolfgang and his sister, Maria Anna, who was four years older. His sister’s nickname was Nannerl.Leopold was an excellent musician, and when Nannerl was seven, he began giving her piano lessons. Three-year-old Wolfgang watched these lessons with great interest and would try to play some of the notes his sister played. When Wolfgang was four, his father began teaching him a few easy pieces to play. The boy could play them perfectly, so his father continued to teach both Nannerl and him. He taught them not just music, but languages and school subjects as well.When Wolfgang was five, he began to compose little pieces of music, which his father wrote down for him.Before going further, lets take a moment to understand how musicians lived in the middle and late 1700s in Europe. There were no electronics, so all music was performed and listened to live. If you wrote a lovely piece of music, no matter how lovely, you couldn’t make any money from it. So how did musicians and composers earn a living?Europe was divided into many small city-states, which were run by wealthy aristocrats. An aristocrat is someone who is related to the king or queen of a country. The aristocrats were rich and would pay artists and musicians to entertain their families and friends. When Wolfgang was six, his father took him and his sister on a long concert tour across Europe. They played for aristocrats in such places as Vienna, Prague, Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, Dover, and Amsterdam.Though he was still quite young, Wolfgang enjoyed meeting other musicians and composers on this tour and learning their music. Everything he learned helped him get better at writing his own music. When he was eight, he wrote his first symphony.When Mozart grew up, he worked for a number of aristocrats and even an emperor. He was so amazingly talented, he became rich and famous. However, despite all that success, Mozart had two serious problems: bad health and being terrible at handling money.Mozart’s health problems began as a child. He got a disease called scarlet fever, which probably damaged his kidneys. He also got strep throat. When he was 11, he got smallpox, which was a very deadly disease. It’s amazing that he survived it.As an adult, he often had toothaches and fevers. He got lung infections, probably had yellow fever, and suffered through bouts of tonsillitis. Today, if your tonsils get infected, doctors simply removed them. That was not an option in the 1700s.When he was composing– and he was almost always composing–he didn’t get much rest. He wasn’t a strong, healthy person. Illness and being overtired made life difficult for him.Mozart’s other problem–being terrible at handling money–meant that the times he was rich, he wasted his fortune. He liked for his wife and his children to wear expensive clothes and to live in expensive houses and to eat expensive food and to travel in expensive carriages. He would spend more money than he earned, and soon would be poor again. Sometimes the aristocrats he worked for didn’t want to pay him very much, so he was often trying to find a better position with someone who would pay more.In 1790, after being poor for awhile, his financial situation began to improve. But a year later, he fell ill and became bedridden (meaning he was too weak to get out of bed). Mozart died in Vienna on December 5, 1791, at age 35.You would think that being such a great composer and having worked for so many wealthy people, Mozart would have had a large funeral with lots of admirers there. But no. He was buried in an unmarked grave. No mourners showed up.During his short life, Mozart composed more than 600 works, including many symphonies and operas. He also wrote works for choirs and smaller groups of instruments. His compositions are still loved, admired, and performed today.Fun Facts:• When you see the name of a piece of music by Mozart, it’s usually followed by the letter K and a number. Those are called Köchel numbers. (In English, it is usually pronounce kurshal) Ludwig von Köchel made a list of all of Mozart’s works, put them in the order they were written, and gave each one a number.• K. 1 is a little minuet Mozart wrote when he was six years old. K. 626, is the requiem Mozart was working on when he died.• In 2017, BBC News Magazine asked 172 opera singers to vote for the best opera ever written. Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, was the winner.
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