Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, at Getreidegasse 9 in Salzburg, then the seat of an independent prince-archbishopric within the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Leopold Mozart, was a violinist and composer employed at the archbishop's court and the author of an influential violin-teaching method; his mother was Anna Maria Mozart, née Pertl. Of seven children born to the couple, only Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna, nicknamed 'Nannerl,' survived infancy, and Leopold soon recognized that both children were prodigiously gifted at the keyboard.

In 1762, Leopold Mozart began showing off his two musically gifted children, taking six-year-old Wolfgang and eleven-year-old Nannerl first to Munich and then to Vienna, where they performed for Empress Maria Theresa and the imperial family at Schönbrunn Palace. Audiences were astonished by Wolfgang's ability to play with a cloth covering the keyboard, identify pitches by ear, and improvise fluently, and his early fame as a keyboard prodigy quickly spread through aristocratic circles across the German-speaking lands.

From June 1763 to November 1766, the Mozart family undertook a sprawling 'grand tour,' traveling by carriage through Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris, London, The Hague, and Amsterdam, performing for royalty and nobility along the way. In London, young Wolfgang formed a close bond with Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose elegant galant style left a lasting mark on Mozart's own; it was in London, at around age eight, that Mozart composed his first symphony.

Leaving Nannerl and their mother behind, Leopold took thirteen-year-old Wolfgang on the first of three trips to Italy between 1769 and 1773, then the undisputed center of European opera. In Rome, Mozart famously heard Gregorio Allegri's closely guarded Miserere performed in the Sistine Chapel and transcribed it from memory afterward, and in Bologna he impressed the respected teacher Padre Martini enough to be admitted to the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica. The trip's centerpiece was the opera Mitridate, re di Ponto, composed for Milan and performed with considerable success in December 1770.