Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

Greater than a quar­ter of a mil­len­ni­um after he com­posed his first items of music, dif­fer­ent lis­ten­ers will eval­u­ate dif­fer­ent­ly the spe­cif­ic nature of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. However one can onerous­ly fail to be impressed by the truth that he wrote these works when he was 5 years outdated (or, as some schol­ars have it, 4 years outdated). It’s not unknown, even immediately, for pre­co­cious, musi­cal­ly inclined chil­dren of that age to sit down down and put togeth­er sim­ple melodies, and even rea­son­ably com­plete songs. However what number of of them can write some­factor like Mozart’s “Min­uet in G Main”?

The video above, which traces the evo­lu­tion of Mozart’s music, begins with that piece — nat­u­ral­ly sufficient, because it’s his ear­li­est identified work, and thus hon­ored with the Köchel cat­a­logue num­ber of KV 1. There­after we hear music com­posed by Mozart at var­i­ous ages of kid­hood, youth, ado­les­cence, and grownup­hood, accom­pa­nied by a piano roll graph­ic that illus­trates its increas­ing com­plex­i­ty.

And as with com­plex­i­ty, so with famil­iar­i­ty: even lis­ten­ers who know lit­tle of Mozart’s work will sense the emer­gence of a dis­tinc­tive fashion, and even those that’ve naked­ly heard of Mozart will rec­og­nize “Piano Sonata No. 16 in C main” when it comes on.

Mozart com­posed that piece when he was 32 years outdated. It’s often known as the “Sonata facile” or “Sonata sem­plice,” regardless of its dis­tinct lack of eas­i­ness for novice (and even inter­me­di­ate) piano play­ers. It’s now cat­a­loged as KV 545, which places it towards the tip of Mozart’s oeu­vre, and certainly his life. Three years lat­er, the evo­lu­tion­ary lis­ten­ing jour­ney of this video arrives on the “Requiem in D minor,” which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured right here on Open Cul­ture for its exten­sive cin­e­mat­ic use to evoke evil, lone­li­ness, des­per­a­tion, and reck­on­ing. The piece, KV 626, con­tains Mozart’s final notes; the unan­swer­in a position however nev­er­the­much less irre­sistible ques­tion stays of whether or not they’re some­how implied in his first ones.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist

Hear the Items Mozart Com­posed When He Was Solely 5 Years Previous

Learn an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Yr-Previous Mozart’s Further­or­di­nary Musi­cal Abilities

Mozart’s Diary The place He Com­posed His Closing Mas­ter­items Is Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­in a position On-line

What Films Educate Us About Mozart: Explor­ing the Cin­e­mat­ic Makes use of of His Well-known Lac­rimosa

See Mozart Performed on Mozart’s Personal Fortepi­ano, the Instru­ment That Most Authen­ti­cal­ly Cap­tures the Sound of His Music

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­guide.