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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, the seventh and last child of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl, and was baptized the following day as Johannes Chrysostomus (after the saint) Wolfgangus Theophilus (Mozart himself preferred the French Amadè). He was not the greatest musical prodigy who ever lived. Felix Mendelssohn was, achieving already at ages sixteen and seventeen respectively the full apotheosis of his talent in his magnificent octet for strings and his entrancing overture to A Midsummer's Night Dream, works he never bettered—and perhaps rarely equaled—for the rest of his life.

For Mozart, the ascent to the top took longer. Many of his early compositions were dazzling and accomplished for his age, but not for more. Critics tend to view his Symphony No. 29 (K201), written when Mozart was eighteen, as his first symphony of real stature, though a lesser case could be made for the uneven No. 25 (K183), written a year earlier, whose hectic first movement is used to dramatic effect in the opening scene of Amadeus. This is the so-called "Little G Minor," to distinguish it from the towering Symphony No. 40, also in G Minor, which was written fourteen years later and would not in quality be confused for a second with the earlier work.

Nor was Mozart's ascent altogether uniform. To proceed in less than a year—April 1776 to January 1777—from the Piano Concerto No. 8 (K246) to the Concerto No. 9 (the "Jeunehomme" [K271], named after the first pianist to perform it) was to make a quantum leap from a charming and accomplished work to a concerto of stunning power and originality, signaled at the outset by the declamatory opening flourish of the orchestra, answered immediately by the entrance of the piano. It was a level Mozart did not sustain in the immediately succeeding concertos. Pianist Alfred Brendel calls it Mozart's first genuine masterpiece, and thinks, moreover, that Mozart never surpassed it in his later great concertos—an early meteor across the heavens. But the great glory of Mozart's achievement is that it was overall a marvelous trajectory of ascent, and in the last decade of his life, he turned out work upon work of imposing genius, with no musical burnout in sight. "The life of Mozart," says Peter Gay in his sprightly Penguin biography, "is the triumph of genius over precociousness." And of all the great composers, remarks Brendel, Mozart is the one he most regrets dying young.

It might also be noted at this point that, contrary to the myth of the childlike idiot savant who simply transcribes whole what is visited upon him by the Muse—a view not discouraged by Amadeus—Mozart worked very hard at his craft. Not only was he well-grounded by his musician father, but he spent many formative hours poring over and even copying out the music of others, which made him, already as a child, an astonishingly adept imitator. "People make a great mistake," he once complained in a letter to his father, "who think that my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over." True, he often composed at blazing speed. And true, he may not have sketched his compositions with all the agonized deliberation of a Beethoven. But sketch he did, often in bits and pieces awaiting just the right commission or needed piece for one of his own performances. One of the major moves of his career, inspired by his rediscovering Bach, was to begin appropriating his early study of counterpoint, as demonstrated, for example, in the tremendous fugal tour de force that is the final movement of the "Jupiter" symphony (K551).

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