Whatever the myth, the music is the star

The view of Mozart, born 250 years ago this Friday, as an inspired buffoon does an injustice to his complexity, writes Eileen Battersby

On January 27th 1756, a son was born to a Salzburg violinist who was also a noted teacher and the author of an important text about the art of violin playing. Within a few years of his child's birth, the father, Leopold, had decided his task on earth would be the promotion of his boy Wolfgang's musical gifts. By the age of three the child had mastered the keyboard; at five he had begun composing. From 1762, he was toured as a phenomenon, with his sister, throughout Europe, under the careful eye of his proud father.

While travelling Europe, the six-year-old Wolfgang, who had already played at the court of the Elector of Bavaria, also taught himself the violin. At seven he performed on the harpsichord at Goethe's house in Weimar. There were other performances as well, for Louis XV at Versailles and George III in London. Finally, in 1766, by then a veteran of 10, he returned home to Salzburg. Within two years, he had composed his first two operas and was on his way to Italy.

Even by the surreal standards of child prodigies, the young Mozart was exceptional, completing about 30 symphonies, admittedly many of them no more than 10 minutes long, before he was 17. His genius soared and matured during his brief adult life, which ended some weeks short of his 36th birthday on December 5th, 1791. Though never as majestically magisterial as Bach, nor as heroically explosive as the innovative Beethoven, Mozart produced a sublime body of work in all genres, from opera to church music, from instrumental to orchestral. His musical legacy endures because his music is beautiful, achieving universality and technical perfection. As pianist Mitsuko Uchida said in a recent Gramophone magazine celebratory piece: "Mozart is special for the whole of humanity because it is not about grand ideas or great concepts, it is about 'I love you', 'you may love me', 'I am sad', 'you are so happy'. It sounds simplistic but at the core of it he is like Shakespeare: he uses the simplest means to elevate us into a universal world of absolute joy and sorrow. Mozart transcends the trivial . . . "

The music certainly does. But Mozart the man has become lodged in the popular imagination as a crazed, often petulant, buffoon from whom glorious music oozed mindlessly - thanks mainly to the shrieking caricature offered by Milos Forman's film, Amadeus (1984), the entertaining movie based on Peter Shaffer's play of the same name. Begun as a burlesque, it ends as a confessional melodrama awash with a jealous rival's guilt and a dubious deathbed race-against-time reconstruction of the composing of the Requiem. Still, as Shaffer pointed out in a fine documentary made some 20 years after the film, the true star of the movie and his play is the music. Amadeus the film wholeheartedly brought Mozart's diverse work - light, graceful, profound and magical - to a vast audience. Unfortunately, it has also left an offbeat impression of a one-dimensional, freakish artist very much at odds with the complex man who emerges from his letters, the insightful Mozart who wrote to his father: "It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me - no one has given as much care to the study of composition as I have. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied." Funny, crude, dismissive, affectionate, distressed, exasperated, vain, endearing, highly intelligent and always human, Mozart was a hard-working philosophical individual who experienced life. Creatively, he looked to Bach and also to Handel, while he revered his fellow Austrian, Haydn, 24 years his senior who survived him by a further 18.

Papa Mozart was strict and there were often family tensions, but he dedicated his life to finding his son a suitable post. This would prove a problem for much of Mozart's career. He was too young for senior positions, and too gifted for junior ones - and always too difficult. After a few more trips to Italy, he returned home, aged 17, to work for the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, for whom he wrote instrumental pieces and sacred works.

In 1775, at 19, he was appointed concert master in Salzburg, a post he had earlier held in an unpaid capacity at 13, and wrote his first piano sonatas (he would eventually complete 18) and the first few of what would be 27 piano concertos. He also completed his five violin concertos, largely at the instigation of his violinist father, for performance by Italian violinist Brunetti and his court orchestra at Salzburg, and more importantly, as Leopold Mozart intended, to impress foreign audiences.

Working for the Prince Archbishop proved an unhappy experience, as they openly disliked each other. In 1777, Mozart, aged 21, travelled in vain to Munich and Mannheim, and later, accompanied by his mother, to Paris, ostensibly on tour but also in the hope of securing a job. Not only did he fail to find a suitable vacancy, but his mother died.

Leopold Mozart, as ever working behind the scenes, summoned his boy home and arranged for him to work in a more senior post, as court and cathedral organist. Back in Salzburg, Mozart wrote church music and orchestral pieces and fretted. His dislike of his home town intensified. Luckily, an opportunity came to relieve his frustration. Commissioned to compose an opera for the court theatre in Munich, he began work on Idomeneo, based on a theme from Greek mythology.

It was 1781. Mozart was informed that the Prince Archbishop was about to visit Vienna and that he was to attend to him there. Mozart obeyed. But having been flattered by noblemen in Munich and having performed in Vienna for Emperor Joseph II, he was outraged when expected to sit among the cooks at the Prince Archbishop's table. Mozart was also refused permission to accept invitations to perform. He had had enough and resigned from his job, although release came only after more squabbling.

Vienna seemed like paradise. It was certainly, as Mozart wrote, "the land of the piano". He set about teaching, composing and establishing himself as a piano virtuoso. More piano concertos followed, as well as piano and violin sonatas.

Most importantly of all, he turned his attention to the string quartet, composing six, which he dedicated to the master of the genre, Haydn. Untypically for Mozart, he composed them slowly, over more than two years.

He also became drawn to earlier music, the works of Bach and Handel. Their use of counterpoint is present in Mozart's finest work of sacred music, the Mass in C Minor, the Grosse Messe . Begun in 1782-3, in common with the Requiem, it was never finished, yet remains among his greatest achievements.

His middle years in Joseph II's Vienna climaxed in 12 piano concertos and the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, the year before Don Giovanni, written in a few months, was first staged in Prague.

Leopold Mozart died in 1788, and his son then composed his final three symphonies, numbers 39, 40 and 41 (the Jupiter), in the course of a few weeks.

He was also concentrating on string quintets. Having written two - K515 in C and K516 in G Minor - in the spring of 1787, he returned to the form in 1790-91, though K515 and K516 would represent the peak of his chamber music composition.

While he was working on his final three symphonies, he was 33, with less than three years to live, and his Viennese world had soured.

He was no longer in demand as a pianist and he was borrowing heavily. His opera, La clemenza di Tito, was only moderately successful in Prague in September. It was quickly followed, however, by Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a complex philosophical pantomime for adults containing some of Mozart's most beautiful music, a Singspeil German-language light opera with spoken dialogue. Here Mozart is an artist of the Enlightenment.

Despite his early death, he left a large body of work, equating to about 200 CDs,with most of the masterworks composed during his final decade. While Bach is God's musician, and Beethoven his wayward son, Mozart is probably his favoured angel. The myths abound, particularly those relating to the Requiem and to the composer's stark burial in a mass grave (common practice in the Vienna of Joseph II). Let the man rest in peace.

As for the music, in this the year of Mozart and Shostakovich, the Russian master will have to take second place to the versatile Austrian genius who triumphed in all genres and conferred narrative sophistication on what had been the Italianate opera.