Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and served the Prince-Archbishop's court there until 1781, when he settled in Vienna as a freelance performer and composer. In 1787 Emperor Joseph II named him chamber composer. He wrote in every main genre of his day, and the works here cover most of them: piano concertos and sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, opera overtures, concertos for wind instruments and church music.

In Vienna he gave his own subscription concerts and wrote eleven piano concertos between February 1784 and March 1786. Their first movements are often described as sonata form with a double exposition: the orchestra states the themes first, then the piano enters and presents them again. The wind instruments are part of the argument, not a backdrop. Only two of the piano concertos, No. 20 in D minor and No. 24 in C minor, are in a minor key, and No. 27 (1791) is sparse and elegiac.

From about 1782 he studied the music of Bach and Handel in the library of Gottfried van Swieten, and counterpoint returned to his writing. Chromatic harmony grows more frequent, as in the Dissonance Quartet, K. 465. The finale of the Jupiter Symphony (1788) combines five themes in a closing fugato. The Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, was finished in October 1791 for Anton Stadler and was written for the basset clarinet, which reaches lower than a standard clarinet. The Requiem was unfinished when Mozart died, and Süssmayr completed it.