AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

so it had to be difficult. When he was five he was writing short pieces, and at that age he first played the harpsichord in a public concert. Leopold Mozart While Mozart was greatly affected by the various composers and musical styles he encountered throughout his short life, the most dominant influence on him, personally and musically, ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1756–91, Austrian Alone of the great Viennese classical ‘trinity’ – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – Mozart (1756–91) was a born theatre animal. From boyhood, opera was his greatest passion and he built on existing conventions to enrich and deepen three distinct types of opera: opera seria, opera buffa and German Singspiel. The Child Prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...

• Techniques
• Early Romantic
• Opera

Mozart was, with Handel, the composer Beethoven revered above all others. And Fidelio could hardly have been written without the example of Mozart’s mature operas. Yet with his strongly ethical, idealistic outlook, even to the point of priggishness, Beethoven regarded works such as Don Giovanni (1787) and, especially, Così fan tutte (1790) as flippant ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘That’s Women for You’ While Don Giovanni was the nineteenth century’s favourite Mozart opera, Così fan tutte, premiered on 26 January 1790, was widely considered frivolous, immoral and (not least by Beethoven) an insult to women. Today we can see it as perhaps the most ambivalent and disturbing of Mozart’s three Da Ponte comedies. In the composer’s ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

1782, Die Entführung aus dem Serail quickly became his most popular work and sealed the composer’s operatic reputation in German-speaking lands. The Viennese expected plenty of laughs from a Singspiel. Mozart obliged with his first great comic creation: the ‘foolish, coarse and spiteful’ (Mozart’s words) harem overseer Osmin, a larger-than-life compound of sullen irascibility, prejudice, lechery and ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

ArtHaus Musik 100 188 and 189; Soloists: Ulrike Sonntag (Pamina), Andrea Frei (Queen of Night), Deon van der Walt (Tamino), Thomas Mohr (Papageno), Cornelius Hauptmann (Sarastro) Personalities | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Classical Era | Opera ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

roles are likewise a mixture of the serious and the comic, with the chameleon Don Giovanni and the scorned but devoted Donna Elvira of so-called ‘mixed type’ (mezzo carattere). Mozart called Don Giovanni an opera buffa. However, from the awesome D minor introduction of the overture – foreshadowing the chilling appearance of the ‘stone guest’ who drags the hero ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

Mozart had long admired the inspired synthesis of French and Italian opera in Gluck’s ‘reform’ works. His greatest opera seria, Idomeneo, premiered in Munich on 29 January 1781, draws much from Gluck, especially the hieratic scenes of Alceste (another opera concerned with human sacrifice). Yet its harmonic daring, orchestral richness and lyrical expansiveness are entirely Mozart’s ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

intends to spare Sesto, but Vitellia steps forward and owns her responsibility. The magnanimous Tito spares everyone, and all join to praise his clemency. Personalities | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Classical Era | Opera ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

and Susanna revealing a growing depth as the opera proceeds. But Figaro’s greatest glories are its many ensembles, far more intricate than anything the Viennese had heard before. Here Mozart uses his symphonic and contrapuntal mastery to weave together contrasted musical lines for dramatic ends, as in the ‘recognition’ sextet in Act III, the composer’s own favourite number. ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

, all within a single clock. In 1736, George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) wrote and arranged numerous pieces for a clock that played both bells and organ pipes. In 1790 Mozart composed a great masterpiece expressly for a form of barrel organ. Hand-cranked barrel pianos first appeared, in Italy, late in the eighteenth century. Initially small, but by ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

The celesta is a type of keyboard glockenspiel, with a range of four octaves upwards from middle C, and a damping pedal like a piano. Inside the body of the instrument is a series of chromatically tuned metal bars, which are struck with felt hammers when the performer plays the keyboard. Creation of the Celesta The celesta was ...

• Instruments
• Brass
• Electric & Electronic
• Keyboards
• Percussion
• Stringed
• Woodwind

improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), who quickly developed a new, individual style of keyboard writing. On the other hand, instrumental developments can come about because composers or performers demand them. In the ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Classical Era

to appear in music by J. C. Bach and Arne in the 1760s, although they differed in several ways from the modern instrument. The famous Mannheim orchestra championed it. Mozart wrote parts for it in his Divertimento K113, perhaps as a result of his travels to the Mannheim court. His operas make extensive, if straight-forward, use of ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Late Romantic

The German player and maker Iwan Müller had developed a 13-keyed instrument in about 1812 and the music being written for the clarinet at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Weber, among others, made an instrument with 13 keys essential. While its chamber-music life in the classical period had produced such masterpieces as the Beethoven Septet (op. 20) ...