5
" The early to mid-1780s were years of exponential growth for Mozart, not only in terms of his family and career but in his style and exposure as a composer and musician. He met Gottfried van Swieten, a Viennese government official who was a keen patron of musicians at this time. He gave Mozart access to his formidable library of compositions, and Mozart delved into study of the works of some famous predecessors, most notably Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Access to the breadth of their work highly influenced many of Mozart’s works in the year to come, as he shifted to a more Baroque style in many of his compositions. This influence can most clearly be heard in his opera The Magic Flute, as well as Symphony No. 41. It was also at this time, and perhaps influenced by his study of the greats that came so recently before him, that Mozart wrote one of his greatest liturgical pieces, Mass in C minor. It was performed for the first time in 1783 when Wolfgang and Constanze traveled to Salzburg in order to visit Mozart’s father and sister. "
― Hourly History , Mozart: A Life From Beginning to End
7
" Between 1782 and 1785, Mozart worked prolifically as a solo artist, composing and performing primarily piano concertos. At his most productive, he would produce three or four new concertos in a season. But access to theatrical space so frequently was difficult to manage in Vienna, so Mozart took to booking unconventional spaces for his performances, including restaurants and apartment buildings. It is through these popular concerts, with himself as the central fixture, that Mozart perfected his persona as a performer and artist in the public eye. His youth, charm, and eagerness to please delighted audiences of the time, who were also more than aware they were watching a musical savant hone and perfect his abilities and set the tone for the period’s most influential musical genres. "
― Hourly History , Mozart: A Life From Beginning to End
9
" At the end of 1785, Mozart once again shifted his focus. He moved away from the rapid and voluminous composition of piano concertos and longed to return to writing operas. He had written Die Entführung aus dem Serail only three years prior, but despite its raging success throughout Europe, he had little motivation to return to operatic writing until he met Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte was a true Renaissance Man—not only was he a Roman Catholic priest, he was a successful poet, and most importantly, an opera librettist. Throughout Da Ponte’s life, he would write the libretti for 28 operas from 11 different composers, Mozart among them. Da Ponte was responsible for the libretti for three of Mozart’s most prolific opera in the modern era—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. "
― Hourly History , Mozart: A Life From Beginning to End
12
" Mozart began composing highly intricate pieces of music in a period of time when the most popular genre of music was style galant—an elegant genre to be sure, but defined by the simplicity of its structure. The style galant was in and of itself a reaction to the musical style that had come directly before it, commonly referred to as the Baroque period. Music in the Baroque style was highly embellished, defined by the use of ornamentation, or unnecessarily complicated measures inserted throughout the piece of music. Critics of the period were quick to say that the Baroque style lacked a coherent melody and was largely dissonant, even to the trained ear. Popular musical forms in the Baroque period included sonatas and cantatas, the former of which Mozart would return to and utilize toward the end of his career. Baroque music was defined by its seriousness—it was often cited as being largely unpleasant to listen to unless one was a musician oneself. The style galant, in response, depended on its light-heartedness and its wide range of appeal to a variety of audiences. The Classical style, which Mozart and his peers pioneered, was another response to the oversimplification of popular music that the style galant characterized. As previously discussed, Mozart spent a great deal of his early years in Paris studying the works of Baroque masters Bach and Handel, and that period of music greatly influenced many of his most recognizable works. Mozart, however, had the talent (and the distance from the period when Baroque music was at its height) to study the most valid criticisms of the Baroque style and pick and choose the intricacies of the style that worked, while discarding the ones that did not. He was able to adapt the dated style to form a completely new aesthetic while steering popular music back toward the trend of compositions that were more complex than the style galant afforded. "
― Hourly History , Mozart: A Life From Beginning to End
