Questions to ask Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart's life in a few lines

Mozart was born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756. His father Leopold, a violinist in the Archbishop's orchestra, taught him and his older sister Maria Anna (Nannerl), and from 1762 took the children on tours that reached Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Netherlands and Italy. As an adult he worked for the Archbishop of Salzburg until 1781, then moved to Vienna, married Constanze Weber in 1782 and lived by teaching, concerts, publishing and commissions. He wrote more than 600 works. He died in Vienna on 5 December 1791, aged 35; the exact cause is unknown.

Mozart signed himself Wolfgang Amadè or Wolfgang Gottlieb more often than Amadeus. Small details like that make an interview sound researched.

Before you start: the letters

The Mozart family letters are one of the richest records of any composer: Leopold's letters from the tours, Wolfgang's letters to his father, sister and wife, full of jokes, plans, complaints and money. Use them for every answer. Mozart's own letters can be crude and silly, especially to his cousin; for a school project, keep that side mild.

You can rehearse your interview with an AI recreation of Mozart on Yuga, by voice or text. It is built from his letters and the historical record, but it is not Mozart and it can be wrong; cite the letters or a biography, not the app. For a side by side with his younger contemporary, see Mozart vs Beethoven.

The child prodigy on tour

What the letters and records show: in 1762 the children played for the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. On the long tour of 1763 to 1766 they spent over a year in London, where Wolfgang met Johann Christian Bach and wrote his first symphonies. The lawyer Daines Barrington tested the boy and sent a report to the Royal Society, published in its Philosophical Transactions in 1770. In Rome in 1770, Leopold reported, Wolfgang wrote down Gregorio Allegri's Miserere from memory after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel.

1. What do you remember about playing for the Empress Maria Theresa?
2. What did Johann Christian Bach teach you in London?
3. What tests did Daines Barrington set you, and how did you pass them?
4. How did you write down the Miserere after hearing it once?
5. Did you ever wish you had stayed home and played like other children?

Salzburg, the job hunt and the break of 1781

What the letters show: Mozart resented his post under Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. In 1777 he set out with his mother to find a better job in Mannheim and Paris, fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber, and found no post. His mother died in Paris on 3 July 1778; his letters show him breaking the news to his father gently, over two letters. In 1781, in Vienna with the Archbishop's household, he quarrelled with his employer and was dismissed, and his letter of June 1781 describes the court official Count Arco literally kicking him out of the room.

1. Why were you so unhappy working for Archbishop Colloredo?
2. How did you tell your father that your mother had died in Paris?
3. What happened with Count Arco in June 1781?
4. Why did you decide to stay in Vienna without a salary?

Freelance in Vienna

What the letters and records show: he married Constanze Weber, Aloysia's younger sister, in August 1782 against his father's wishes. They had six children; two survived. From February 1784 he kept a catalogue of his works, entering each one with its date and opening bars. In 1785 Joseph Haydn told Leopold, as Leopold reported to Nannerl, that Wolfgang was the greatest composer he knew in person or by name. From 1788 he wrote letters to his fellow Freemason Michael Puchberg asking for loans.

1. How did you earn a living without a court post?
2. Why did your father object to Constanze?
3. Why did you start keeping a catalogue of your works in 1784?
4. What did Haydn's praise mean to you?
5. Why were you short of money when you earned well in some years?

The operas

What the record shows: with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte he wrote The Marriage of Figaro (Vienna, 1786), Don Giovanni (Prague, 1787) and Così fan tutte (1790). The Magic Flute, with a German text by the actor and manager Emanuel Schikaneder, opened in a suburban Vienna theatre on 30 September 1791. In a letter of October 1781 he argued that in an opera the poetry must be the obedient daughter of the music.

1. Why did you choose a play that mocked aristocrats for The Marriage of Figaro?
2. Why did Prague love your operas more than Vienna did?
3. Why does Don Giovanni end with the hero dragged down to hell instead of a happy ending?
4. What do you mean when you say poetry should be the obedient daughter of the music?
5. Why did you write The Magic Flute in German for a popular theatre?

The last year, the Requiem and Salieri

What the record shows: in 1791 an anonymous messenger commissioned a Requiem; the patron was Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted to pass it off as his own. Mozart left it unfinished, and his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it. The story that Antonio Salieri poisoned him began as a rumour years later and was made famous by Alexander Pushkin's play Mozart and Salieri (1830) and the play and film Amadeus (1979 and 1984). There is no evidence for it. In a letter of 14 October 1791 Mozart describes taking Salieri to The Magic Flute and Salieri applauding every number.

1. Who did you think had ordered the Requiem?
2. What were you working on in the autumn of 1791, besides the Requiem?
3. How did you write two operas, The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito, in the same summer?
4. How did you feel when Salieri praised The Magic Flute?
5. Was Salieri your enemy?

More detail in did Salieri poison Mozart.

Mozart answers, in his own words

Q: How do you write music that pleases everyone?

In the same letter he says his new piano concertos sit between too easy and too difficult: brilliant and pleasing, with passages only connoisseurs fully appreciate, yet written so the less learned enjoy them without knowing why. That is a paraphrase.

Q: Does it come easily to you?

Q: How do you think about death? In a letter to his ill father of 4 April 1787 he wrote, in substance, that he had come to see death as the true goal of life and a consoling friend rather than something terrifying.

Questions Mozart couldn't answer

He never heard of K numbers: Ludwig von Köchel catalogued his works in 1862. He could not know the film Amadeus, the “Mozart effect” claims of the 1990s, or that Beethoven, who was 21 when Mozart died, would be compared with him for two centuries. Don't ask where he is buried: he was placed in a shared grave at St Marx cemetery under Vienna's burial rules of the time (not a pauper's grave, as often claimed), and the exact spot is unknown.

Where to read the letters

The Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg publishes the Digital Mozart Edition online, including his scores and the family letters in German. In English, Emily Anderson's The Letters of Mozart and His Family (1938, revised 1985) is the standard translation. Otto Erich Deutsch's Mozart: A Documentary Biography (1965) gathers the other documents, and Maynard Solomon's Mozart: A Life (1995) and Jan Swafford's Mozart: The Reign of Love (2020) are full biographies. See also famous classical composers.