Mozart's music is, to most, a marvel, but his brief, "soap-operatic" life — indeed, his very survival for not quite 36 years — is equally miraculous!

Leopold Mozart, violinist and composer, and his wife had seven children. Only two survived: Maria Anna, and the youngest, Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus — later changed to Wolfgang Amadeo, then Wolfgang Amadè. (Contrary to popular belief, Mozart only referred to himself as "Amadeus" in jest.) Because his mother barely survived his birth and was unable to nurse him, he was fed plain water only, and the child did not even begin to walk until he was 3 years old. By that time, however, the boy had already begun to display extraordinary musical gifts. By age 6, he was a composer, violinist, and virtuoso on the clavier who had performed before the Bavarian elector and the Austrian empress. Leopold Mozart therefore decided that it might be advantageous to exhibit the prodigious talents of his son and daughter (who was a gifted keyboard player) to a wider audience. Thus, in mid-1763, when Maria Anna was 12 and Wolfgang 7, the family set out on a grand European music tour. The children were to spend much of their childhood traveling by coach from court to court, as the young Mozart astonished his audiences with his incredible musical skills.

Wolfgang was certainly blessed with musical genius, but he was not favored with robust health. Beginning at age 6, he suffered from streptococcal respiratory infections, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, tonsillitis, sinusitis, smallpox, frostbite, bronchitis, dental abscesses, and possibly viral hepatitis. Just before his tenth birthday, while in The Hague, the child was in a coma and lost a great deal of weight, probably as a result of typhoid fever. It is remarkable that he survived all of these ordeals and reached his twentieth year!

Mozart spent most of the years from 1774 through 1781 in his hometown of Salzburg, where he became increasingly discontented because of his inability to find a rewarding musical position. His relationship with his patron, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, was stormy, and in 1781 he resigned his post and went to Vienna, where he hoped his musical fortunes would improve. He made his living during the following years by teaching, publishing his music, playing at patrons' houses or in public, and composing on commission (particularly operas). He finally obtained a minor court post it 1787; it provided him with a reasonable salary, but did put his astounding musical gifts to good use, requiring nothing beyond the writing of dances for court balls.

In August of 1782, three and a half years after the young soprano, Aloysia Weber, refused Mozart's marriage proposal, the 26-year-old composer married her younger sister, 20-year-old Constanze. Between June 1783 and July 1791, the couple had six children, but suffered the loss of four of them. Their first child died at the age of two months, their third lived less than a month, their fourth lived six months, and their fifth survived only one hour. Mozart was granted little time to know his two remaining sons, who were aged 7 years old and 4 months old when their father died.

Mozart spent his last years in Vienna in growing financial distress. By musicians' standards, he earned a good income, but through lavish spending and poor management, he found it increasingly difficult to maintain the living standard to which the family had become accustomed. He incurred considerable debt, which caused him much anxiety and even feelings of despair.

Late in November of 1791, Mozart became seriously ill and was bedridden for the last two weeks of his life. Death finally snatched him shortly after midnight on December 5, 1791, about two months short of his 36th birthday. The circumstances surrounding his untimely death soon gave rise to a number of myths and legends. The official diagnosis was "miliary fever," but the physicians who attended him never were quite certain of the cause of his death. It is commonly thought today that he died of uremia following chronic kidney disease, or of rheumatic fever, but soon after his death, poisoning was suspected. In addition to the theory that composer Antonio Salieri murdered Mozart out of jealousy, gossip about Mozart's involvement with various women during his last years began to circulate. A friend and Masonic Lodge-brother of Mozart's attacked his own pregnant wife, who was one of Mozart's piano pupils, on the day after Mozart died; the frenzied man disfigured his wife with razor attacks on her face and throat, and then committed suicide, and rumors arose that the maimed woman was Mozart's mistress. Scholars now generally agree that Mozart was not murdered, but we may never know exactly how and why he met his early end, or even exactly where he was buried: because of his debts, he was interred with minimal ceremony in a Vienna suburb, his friends having turned back from following the hearse at the city gates. "Without a note of music, forsaken by all he held dear, the remains of this prince of harmony were committed to the earth — not even in a grave of his own but in the common pauper's grave." For some reason, even Mozart's widow did not visit the supposed burial site until 1808.

Mozart wrote the following to a friend about three months prior to his death: "I know from what I suffer that the hour has come. I am at the point of death. I have come to the end without having had the enjoyment of my talent. Life was so beautiful, my career began under such fortunate auspices. But no one can change his destiny. No one can measure his days. One must resign oneself, it will be as Providence wills. I must close. Here is my death song. I must not leave it incomplete."

Mozart did, in fact, leave his last work, his Requiem (a setting of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead), unfinished. Scholars are quite sure that the work was commissioned in July of 1791 by Count Walsegg-Stuppach as a memorial to his late wife. Walsegg delivered his commission via an emissary in order to remain anonymous, because he seems to have intended to pass off the composition as his own (according to tradition, Mozart came to consider this mysterious emissary, whose identity was also concealed, as a messenger of his own death, but Mozart's surviving letters from this time seem to contradict this legend). The watermarks on Mozart's manuscript show that he could not have started work on the Requiem before his return from a trip to Prague in September of 1791. It is clear that he was working on it when he was stricken with his final illness. From analysis of the 99 extant sheets of paper, the ink used, and the handwriting in the score, scholars are quite certain that Mozart completed and scored the Introit (Requiem), and he sketched, at least in outline, the Kyrie, Sequence (Dies irae) and much of the Offertory. We may never know what additional musical sketches or instructions he left behind him at his death, but upon these a student of his completed the composition.

Despite the resulting unevenness in the quality of the work, the Requiem has maintained its position as a masterpiece for two centuries. Baroque elements are prominent: the Kyrie's double fugue sounds quite Handelian, as do the operatic choral cries of the Dies irae and Rex tremendae majestatis. The Recordare displays the beautiful combination of learned German and sweetly melodic Italian musical elements that are characteristic of Mozart's incomparable compositional style.

After her husband's death, Constanze Mozart needed money and wanted the Requiem to be completed. Mozart's protégé, Joseph Eybler, finished some of the orchestration, but he soon abandoned the project, and Constanze then gave the score and some related scraps of paper to 25-year-old Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766-1803), another student of Mozart's. Süssmayr later claimed sole responsibility for the portion of the Dies Irae after "Qua resurget ex favilla" and the last three movements of the work (Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei), but scholars have since questioned this. How much of the later sections of the Requiem are really Mozart's music? This, like the miraculous nature of Mozart's musical talent, his survival to adulthood despite frequent serious illness and the stresses of constant travel, family tragedies, and lack of musical and financial success, and the circumstances surrounding his death, may remain forever cloaked in mystery.

© 2000 Lorelette Knowles