At 16, he wrote a letter to his sister with alternate lines upside down. Papa be annoyed not must. I that just like today feel. I help it cannot. I gish you nood wight. Sound sleeply. But there was a larger point to these jests. Sitting in that small coach riding over often primitive roads that could leave Wolfgang picturesquely complaining about his sore bottom, a large-scale social drama was taking place: the old system of court patronage was being loyally challenged by the father and playfully provoked by the son.
His intention was to earn more money and find a better court position for himself, using his children as bait. To Leopold, Wolfgang kept slighting matters that had to be taken seriously. It was a flexing of intellectual muscles as well as a provocation. When he lived in Vienna, Mozart wrote horn concertos for a Salzburg musician, Joseph Leutgeb, but at a price: Mozart tossed his scores around the room and required Leutgeb to assemble them on all fours.
But it was iconoclastic. The distaste became mutual. As Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon points out, Salzburg was astonishingly late among European cities to create any kind of a Mozart memorial. Not until was a statue, by Ludwig Schwanthaler, erected in his memory.
There was bad blood here, even if it now seems difficult to fathom why. But Salzburg still has the aura of a place of retreat. It escaped many traumas of Bavarian and German warfare over the centuries because it was off the main trading route at least until the Nazis saw its prestige as a cultural front. Salzburg was notoriously conservative—in the s 20, Protestants were exiled from the Catholic town; and in a witch was burned there—but as Robert W.
Gutman points out in his recent biography of Mozart, Leopold and others were devotees of the Enlightenment his estate contained two microscopes and a telescope.
The power of the court was also mitigated by the growing power of commerce. Mozart tourists are steered to a dinner concert at the Stiftskeller St. Peter, the oldest restaurant in central Europe; the Mozarts ate there when it was already more than years old. As musicians perform in period costume, a three-course dinner is served including, when I attended, an ice-cream dessert decorated with a chocolate syrup treble clef and a distinctive cocoa-powder profile of Mozart.
Elsewhere, expectations are also undone. It seems at times that there is more museum space devoted to Mozart than there are objects to fill it or ideas to shape it. Consistency, at any rate, is not to be had, and probably never was. And his rebellion came at the precise moment that the old social models were also weakening. Leopold, a violinist, ultimately settled into playing second fiddle, so to speak, to both his son and Michael Haydn.
Like Bach before him, he masterfully incorporated these foreign fashions into his own body of work. He was a devout Freemason, and used sacred chorale melodies in surprising settings, like his opera The Magic Flute. Listen to this overture from his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio , set in a Turkish harem — featuring the pounding of military percussion like a Janissary army, it would have sounded fashionably exotic to Viennese audiences in The following piece is one of a couple that would have been sung by Mozart and his friends in the bar:.
His music portrays all the highs and lows of life experience, and shows a character that is fascinatingly complex. Is it the balance of comedy and death-defying drama in his uncategorizable opera Don Giovanni? The supreme elegance and chromaticism of his Piano Concerto No. Listen as an opening plaintive melody winds its way to massive pillars of sound, heralding a chorus that seems to put Mozart face-to-face with his creator:.
He was revered by the composers of his time and was inspirational to many others throughout history. The Russian composer references Mozart in a few of his works, but most directly in the Suite No.
In and beyond, Mozart may be decomposing sorry but he shows no sign of slowing down. They touch on the depths of human emotion and experience. The Skoove app shows you the exact fingering and patiently waits until you have hit the right key.
As Mozart put it in one of his many letters to his father:. Beethoven had a huge impact on the structure and scale of music. He was an innovator, his music takes us from the Classical to Romantic around periods.
This was a move from lighter music with a clear texture to dramatic statements of individual emotions through music. Learn a version of Moonlight Sonata with Skoove. Skoove guides you through the learning process patiently by showing you the correct fingering and waiting until you hit the right keys. Similar to Mozart, Beethoven in real life was different from the Beethoven of mythology.
Beethoven was also taught first by his father. In he briefly studied with Mozart and later Haydn. He became a virtuoso pianist admired for his improvisation skills. The stories of his temper and eccentricity begin around the time his hearing deteriorated.
His last 10 years were spent unable to hear. Yet for Beethoven composing was a necessity; furthermore, he had to express what was in his heart. Unlike many other artists , Mozart wanted to find faults in his own work.
He would listen to different compositions for hours on end and then deliberately make changes in his own compositions, to perfect. He did this many times, tirelessly going through every bit of the composition until he was satisfied. Since the day he was born, Mozart was exposed to challenges. He had a sister who was a very talented musician as well.
He took it as a challenge rather than handicap and went on to perfect every challenging instrument until he had a higher command over the melodies. Mozart was exposed to a live audience since he was a child. He overcame his stage fright and audience awareness at a very young age. His father would make him practice all the melodies with his sister in front of a live audience.
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