Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote more than six hundred works in thirty-five years and was buried in a common grave. Born in Salzburg in 1756, he was playing the keyboard at three, composing at five, and was taken across Europe by his father Leopold on tours lasting years — London, Paris, Vienna, Italy — performing for courts and being tested by sceptics who suspected a dwarf. The prodigy years cost him. He was a servant of the Archbishop of Salzburg, resented it, and was dismissed in 1781 with a kick from the archbishop's steward. He went freelance in Vienna, which almost nobody did, and lived on teaching, subscription concerts, publication and commissions. He married Constanze Weber against his father's wishes in 1782. The Vienna decade produced the mature work: the piano concertos, which he wrote to perform himself; the last symphonies, including the Jupiter; the string quartets dedicated to Haydn, who told Leopold that his son was the greatest composer he knew; and the operas with Da Ponte — The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte — which gave singing characters interior lives rather than types. He earned well and spent more. The Magic Flute opened in 1791 to a popular audience and was a success he lived just long enough to see. He died in December 1791 at thirty-five, probably of rheumatic fever or a streptococcal infection, leaving the Requiem unfinished. The burial in an unmarked common grave was ordinary Viennese practice, not poverty. The exact site of the grave in St Marx cemetery is unknown.

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