Who was Mozart? The prodigy and his music, explained

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer, born in Salzburg in 1756, who performed for the courts of Europe as a small child and became one of the most admired composers who ever lived. Who was Mozart beyond the legend? A hard-working professional who wrote over 600 works in every form of his day, from symphonies and piano concertos to operas such as The Magic Flute, and who died in Vienna in 1791, aged 35.

In short

• Mozart was trained by his father, toured Europe from the age of six, and spent his last ten years as a freelance composer and pianist in Vienna.
• His works are numbered in the Köchel catalogue, from K. 1, written at about five, to K. 626, the Requiem he left unfinished.
• The story that his rival Salieri poisoned him comes from a play and a film, and the "Mozart effect" on intelligence did not survive testing.

What was Mozart's life like?

Short, crowded and public. His father, Leopold, a violinist and composer at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, taught Wolfgang and his older sister, Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, and took them on tour as child prodigies. Between the ages of six and 17, Wolfgang spent years on the road, playing for kings, empresses and paying audiences.

Year	Event
1756	Born in Salzburg, 27 January
1761–1762	Writes his first pieces, aged about five; first tour, to Munich and Vienna
1763–1766	The family's grand tour: Paris, London, the Netherlands; he writes his first symphonies
1769–1773	Three journeys to Italy; his opera Mitridate is staged in Milan when he is 14
1773–1781	Court musician in Salzburg, restless under Archbishop Colloredo; his mother dies on a job-hunting trip to Paris in 1778
1781	Dismissed after a quarrel with the archbishop, he stays in Vienna as a freelancer
1782	Marries Constanze Weber; The Abduction from the Seraglio is a hit
1784	Joins a Masonic lodge; years of success as a pianist playing his own concertos
1786–1791	The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute
1791	Falls ill on 20 November and dies on 5 December, leaving the Requiem unfinished

The picture of Mozart as a carefree genius dying poor comes mostly from later legend. In Vienna he earned well in good years, lived expensively, and then struggled when concert life shrank during an Austrian war with the Ottoman Empire in the late 1780s. He was buried in an ordinary "common grave" at St. Marx Cemetery, which in Viennese practice of the time meant a grave for a commoner, not a pauper's pit.

How much did he write?

A great deal, and the catalogue of his works shows how much. Mozart's music is identified by Köchel numbers, from the catalogue the Austrian scholar Ludwig von Köchel published in 1862, which put every known work in order of composition. It ran from K. 1, a short keyboard piece, to K. 626, the Requiem. The Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg now publishes the ninth edition, completed in 2024, with many works redated, and new finds keep turning up: a string trio from his teens was identified in a Leipzig library in September 2024 and catalogued as K. 648.

A worked example shows the scale. From K. 1 around 1761 to K. 626 in 1791 is 30 years. Divide 626 entries by 30 and you get about 21 works a year, every year, from the age of five. The numbers include short songs and dances, but also 22 works for the stage, more than 40 symphonies, 27 piano concertos and hours-long operas. In 1788 alone, he wrote his last three symphonies, Nos. 39, 40 and 41, in about six weeks.

What should you listen to first?

Five works, one from each kind of music he excelled at, with something specific to listen for.

1. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525 (1787). A serenade for strings. Listen to the first ten seconds: a phrase that leaps up like a rocket, then an answer. Most of his music is built from questions and answers like this.
2. Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, K. 467 (1785). Go to the slow middle movement. Muted strings pulse underneath while the piano sings a long melody over them, as if it were an opera singer.
3. The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492 (1786). Hear the finale of Act 2, about 20 minutes of continuous music in which characters arrive one by one and the plot thickens. Listen for several people singing different things, and feelings, at the same time, which only music can do.
4. Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 (1788). One of only two symphonies he wrote in a minor key. It starts restless, with the violas shivering under an anxious tune, and stays that way.
5. Requiem, K. 626 (1791). His last work, completed after his death by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr. In the "Lacrimosa", only the first eight bars are by Mozart; listen for where the music changes hands.

What links them is clarity. Each phrase is easy to follow, yet the layers underneath are complex, which is why the same pieces work for beginners and specialists.

Did Salieri poison Mozart?

No. Antonio Salieri was the court composer in Vienna, more senior and successful than Mozart at the time. Rumors after Mozart's death that Salieri had poisoned him were later turned into fiction: Alexander Pushkin's short play Mozart and Salieri in 1830, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera of it in 1897, and Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus of 1979, filmed by Miloš Forman in 1984. The real relationship was a rivalry between colleagues. Mozart took Salieri to a performance of The Magic Flute weeks before he died and reported that he applauded, and in 1785 the two even wrote a cantata together, a printed copy of which was found in Prague and made public in 2016.

Still argued

What Mozart died of is unknown, because no autopsy was done and the doctors' descriptions are vague: fever, swelling, pain and vomiting. A review of the evidence published in 2001 by two physicians and the musicologist Neal Zaslaw leaned toward rheumatic fever. A 2009 study of Vienna's death records found a rise in deaths from swelling among young men that winter, and proposed a streptococcal infection that damaged the kidneys. Others have suggested trichinosis, from undercooked pork, or kidney failure from other causes. Poisoning is not supported by his symptoms.

Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?

Not in any lasting way. In 1993 a study in Nature by the psychologist Frances Rauscher and colleagues gave 36 college students ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos, K. 448, and found a small improvement on spatial reasoning tasks, such as imagining how a folded paper would look, that faded within about 15 minutes. The press turned it into "Mozart makes babies smarter", and CDs for infants followed. Later reviews of dozens of attempts to repeat the finding found the effect was small or absent, and the original authors said it never applied to general intelligence. Any short boost seems to come from being alert and in a good mood, which music you enjoy can do. For what intelligence tests do measure, see what IQ measures, and for what music does to a listener's brain, how the brain works.

Why does his music still matter?

Because it sets the standard of the Classical style, the music of the late 18th century, along with Joseph Haydn's and the young Beethoven's. Haydn told Mozart's father in 1785 that his son was "the greatest composer known to me by person and repute". His operas are still among the most performed in the world, and they did something new: they made comic characters, servants and countesses, into people with inner lives, much as Shakespeare had done on stage. The Magic Flute, written with the actor-manager Emanuel Schikaneder, a fellow Freemason, is full of the symbols of Freemasonry. And he is a case study in what art can be when craft, speed and feeling arrive together.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what does a Köchel number tell you about a piece by Mozart?
• Where does the Salieri poisoning story come from, and what does the evidence show instead?
• What did the 1993 study actually find, and how did it become the "Mozart effect"?

Sources

• Köchel Catalogue online — International Mozarteum Foundation, Salzburg
• Music and spatial task performance — Nature, Rauscher and others, 1993
• The death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: an epidemiologic perspective — Annals of Internal Medicine, Zegers and others, 2009
• The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Volume 1 — translated by Lady Wallace, Project Gutenberg
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Wikipedia
• Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Wikipedia