Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 27 January —5 December , baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era.
Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty.
At 17, he was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in , he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized.
He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons. He composed more than works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. Anonymous portrait of the child Mozart, possibly by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni; painted in on commission from Leopold Mozart. This was the capital of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, an ecclesiastic principality in what is now Austria, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was the youngest of seven children, five of whom died in infancy.
Leopold Mozart, a native of Augsburg, was a minor composer and an experienced teacher. In , he was appointed as fourth violinist in the musical establishment of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the ruling Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.
