A Short, Easy Guide to the Great Classical Composers

Sample passage:
When [Mozart] was seven years old he played before the royalty at Versailles and Paris, and at the former city had the pleasure of seeing four of his compositions published. Then he and his father went to England and played before Queen Charlotte. There Johann composed his first symphony and astounded the Royal Society by his knowledge of music. “The professors of Europe stood aghast at one who improvised fugues on a given theme and then took a ride-a-cock horse on his father’s stick.” By this time the imperious Archbishop of Salzburg, by whom the father was employed as choirmaster, demanded their return, and, hoping to prove the lad a fraud, locked him in a room for a week to write an oratorio by himself. Wolfgang did it, and the oratorio was sung in the archbishop’s church a few weeks later.

In 1769 the boy went to Italy to learn something of the music of that country, and while there played before astonished audiences in Milan, Bologna, Verona, Naples and Rome, and received from the Pope the title of Cavaliere and the badge of the Order of the Golden Spur, honors bestowed upon only the very greatest. There in Rome, also, he performed the wonderful feat of writing from memory the long papal “Miserere,” copies of which were never allowed to be taken by the singers from the Pope’s chapel. Then at Milan the fourteen-year-old boy wrote an opera, “Mitridate,” which was sung twenty nights in succession. In 1775 he wrote an opera for the Munich carnival, and, every song in it was greeted with “a tremendous uproar and clapping of hands.”