Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer born in Salzburg who was performing for the courts of Europe at six and writing symphonies and operas before he was a teenager. After years in the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg and unsuccessful attempts to find a post in Mannheim and Paris, he settled in Vienna in 1781 as a freelance musician, where he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute before his death at thirty-five. His letters, mostly to his father and sister, are the fullest self-portrait left by any composer of his century, full of gossip, puns, money worries and shop talk about music.