Browse piano sheets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on Zen Virtual Piano.
At three Mozart was picking out chords on the harpsichord, at four playing short pieces, at five composing, and there are anecdotes about his precise memory of pitch and about his scribbling a concerto at the age of five. Just before he was six, his father took him and his sister Nannerl, also highly talented, to Munich to play at the Bavarian court, and a few months later they went to Vienna and were heard at the imperial court and in noble houses. A child who played at the Bavarian court before he was six grew up with an audience of the powerful, which gives the hardship of his later years more weight.
His father, Leopold, came from a family of good standing and wrote a famous violin-playing manual, published in the very year of Mozart’s birth. Leopold was the only teacher the children had, and along with music he taught them languages and academic subjects. With his father’s violin manual published in the year he was born, he seems to have been raised inside a teacher’s craft from the beginning.
Still only 13, Mozart had acquired considerable fluency in the musical language of his time and was especially adept at imitating the musical equivalent of local dialects. In London the family met Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, and under his influence Mozart composed his first symphonies. In Milan he wrote the opera “Mitridate, re di Ponto” in 1770, which was performed with success and led to further opera commissions. A boy who could imitate the musical equivalent of local dialects seems well placed to absorb what he met in London and Milan.
Paris brought a harder time. One of his letters from there hints at a possible post as an organist at Versailles, but Mozart was not interested in such an appointment; he fell into debt and took to pawning valuables. The nadir of the visit came when his mother was taken ill and died on 3 July 1778. Debt, pawned valuables and the loss of his mother in the same city mark the distance between the child prodigy of the royal courts and the musician still looking for a footing.
He had once written to his father that Vienna was “the land of the piano,” and his greatest triumphs there were as a pianist-composer. With the group of concertos of 1784 he established a new level of piano concerto writing: symphonic, melodically rich and orchestrally ingenious, with much melodic material given to the wind instruments in patterns of dialogue. Calling Vienna the land of the piano, and writing concertos built on dialogue between instruments, he seems to have found there a conversation he could join. He died on December 5, 1791, aged 35, with the Requiem largely unfinished.
