Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, the son of a court violinist who taught his sister to play the harpsichord and found the small boy reaching for the keys beside her. By five he was composing. By six he was on tour, playing for the Empress in Vienna, and the story goes that he climbed into her lap after slipping on the polished floor.

The tours made him famous across Europe and they also made him strange. He had spent his childhood performing for kings instead of going to school, and at seventeen he took the only job on offer, court organist to the Archbishop of Salzburg, who paid him like a servant and spoke to him like one. In 1781 he walked out, settled in Vienna and became one of the first composers to live on the open market: concerts, subscriptions, students, commissions.

The Vienna years were the busiest of his life. He wrote at least six hundred works in thirty-five years, and in his late twenties he turned to opera and made it into theatre that worked: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, each with characters who interrupt each other and scheme and mean something on stage. He would work all day, go to a party at night and come home to write until morning.

He was often in debt, borrowing from friends in letters that joked about the borrowing, and he worked harder than almost anyone alive to keep it going. In 1791 he wrote The Magic Flute, a comic opera that became one of the most performed works in the world, and started a Requiem that somebody had commissioned from him anonymously. He died in Vienna that December, at thirty-five, leaving the Requiem unfinished on the desk. His wife Constanze was too ill to go to the funeral, and it rained the day they buried him in a common grave.

The operas stayed. They run in every major opera house in the world, in languages he never heard, and the piano music he played as a six-year-old prodigy is still the first difficult thing children learn. The Requiem was finished by another hand, and the symphonies, the concertos and the clarinet works are still the ones musicians mean when they say a piece is perfect and cannot be improved.