ABRSM
Composer Childhood Series - Mozart
My Childhood: Mozart
Mozart was born in Salzburg into a musical family and showed indications of prodigious abilities at a very young age. Wolfgang was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert’s Cathedral. His father, Leopold Mozart, was deputy Kapellmeister to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg and a minor composer. He was also an experienced teacher; in the year of Mozart’s birth he published a successful violin textbook. His only sibling who survived past birth was his sister Maria Anna.
When Maria Anna was seven, Leopold began giving her keyboard lessons. The three-year old Mozart looked on, evidently with fascination. After the lessons, Mozart often spent much time at the keyboard, and his pleasure showed it sounded good to him. In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the keyboard. To Leopold’s surprise, Mozart could play the tune faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time. In addition, his initial ability to learn the violin on his own was astonishing. At the same time, Mozart started composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down. The father and son seem to have been close. Leopold eventually gave up composing when his son’s outstanding musical talents became evident. He was Wolfgang’s only teacher in his earliest years. He taught his children languages and academic subjects as well as music.
Much of his childhood and adolescence was taken up with tours, which included performances before many of the royal courts of Europe. When he was six, in order to display Mozart’s abilities as a performer and as a rapidly maturing composer, Leopold made several European journeys in which the children were exhibited as child prodigies. In reality, these trips were often arduous, because of the primitive conditions of travel at that time, the need to wait patiently for invitations and reimbursement from the nobility. Nevertheless, during these trips Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other composers. A particularly important influence was Bach, who met Mozart in London in 1764–65. Few years later, in Rome he heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican.