From six-year-old prodigy to Prague's best-loved composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is, for many, simply what music sounds like at its most perfect. A child prodigy from Salzburg, he was touring the courts of Europe at six — famously charming Empress Maria Theresa by jumping into her lap — and writing symphonies before he turned ten. Into a life of just 35 years he packed more than 600 works spanning opera, symphony, concerto and sacred music, composed with a speed and perfection that still astonish scholars. And no city embraced him quite like Prague.
A life at full speed
Refusing the life of a liveried court servant, Mozart walked out of his Salzburg post at 25 and settled in Vienna as one of history's first freelance composers. There he created his greatest operas with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte — The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte — alongside a stream of piano concertos and his final three symphonies, all while lurching between triumph and debt. His last year, 1791, brought The Magic Flute and a mysterious, anonymously commissioned Requiem; the exhausted composer became convinced he was writing it for his own funeral. He died at 35, leaving it unfinished, and was buried in an unmarked communal grave, as Viennese custom of the day dictated.
Mozart and Prague
"My Praguers understand me," Mozart reportedly said — and the city kept proving it. When The Marriage of Figaro reached Prague in 1786 it caused such a sensation that Mozart came to see for himself, writing home that "nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro!" The same visit brought the premiere of his Symphony No. 38, known ever since as the "Prague". The city promptly ordered an opera of its own: Don Giovanni, whose world premiere Mozart conducted at the Estates Theatre in October 1787 — the last theatre still standing where he personally performed. His final opera, La clemenza di Tito, also premiered in Prague. And when news of his death arrived, thousands of Praguers packed St. Nicholas Church for a memorial mass. Vienna gave Mozart an unmarked grave; Prague has kept his music in its concert halls ever since.