Essay Database

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s name is familiar even to people who know little or none of his music. However, Mozart’s fame is based on two different frames of reference: firstly, being the most famous child prodigy in music history (as both a performer and a composer) and secondly, his unquestioned brilliance as an adult composer of Classical symphonies, operas, chamber music, sonatas, church music, and concerti for various instruments. Perhaps what he is best …

…haste with which work on Tito and The Magic Flute had to proceed make this idea plausible. The latter was performed in Vienna on September 30, less than a month after Tito. Death came on December 5, but to the end Mozart felt compelled to continue work on the Requiem, which he did not finish. Fortune never turned for Mozart, and when he died in 1791 at the age of thirty-five, he was buried in an unmarked grave.