Mozart Most Famous Quotes

Think about the most famous geniuses in history: Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, da Vinci, Mozart. What do they have in common?” Charlie reflected on that for a moment. “They’re all men.

The early to mid-1780s were years of exponential growth for Mozart, not only in terms of his family and career but in his style and exposure as a composer and musician. He met Gottfried van Swieten, a Viennese government official who was a keen patron of musicians at this time. He gave Mozart access to his formidable library of compositions, and Mozart delved into study of the works of some famous predecessors, most notably Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Access to the breadth of their work highly influenced many of Mozart’s works in the year to come, as he shifted to a more Baroque style in many of his compositions. This influence can most clearly be heard in his opera The Magic Flute, as well as Symphony No. 41. It was also at this time, and perhaps influenced by his study of the greats that came so recently before him, that Mozart wrote one of his greatest liturgical pieces, Mass in C minor. It was performed for the first time in 1783 when Wolfgang and Constanze traveled to Salzburg in order to visit Mozart’s father and sister.

In 1784, Mozart was also admitted to the Freemasons, and the guild became an important institution to him for the remainder of his life. Many in his social circle were also Masons, he regularly attended meetings at his local lodge, and even composed several pieces of Masonic music, the most famous being a funerary piece he composed on the occasion of the deaths of two close friends.

Mozart, the most famous Wiener of all time.

One of the most overlooked aspects of excellence is how much work it takes. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload, pursued with single-minded intensity. Strenuous effort over long periods of time is a repetitive theme in the biographies of the giants, sometimes taking on mythic proportions (Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Even the most famous supposed exception, Mozart, illustrates the rule. He was one of the lighter spirits among the giants, but his reputation for composing effortlessly was overstated—Mozart himself complained on more than one occasion that it wasn’t as easy as it looked1—and his devotion to his work was as single-minded as Beethoven’s, who struggled with his compositions more visibly. Consider the summer of 1788. Mozart was living in a city that experienced bread riots that summer and in a country that was mobilizing for war. He was financially desperate, forced to pawn his belongings to move to cheaper rooms. He even tried to sell the pawnbroker’s tickets to get more loans. Most devastating of all, his beloved six-month old daughter died in June. And yet in June, July, and August, he completed two piano trios, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, and three symphonies, two of them among his most famous.2 It could not have been done except by someone who, as Mozart himself once put it, is “soaked in music,…immersed in it all day long.”3 Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about 10 years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment.4 Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, labor.5 Nor is all of this work productive. What we see of the significant figures’ work is typically shadowed by an immense amount of wasted effort—most successful creators produce clunkers, sometimes far more clunkers than gems.6