Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first piece at age 5. By 6, he was performing for the Emperor of Austria. By 35, he was dead — writing a Requiem he seemed to believe was for himself, commissioned under mysterious circumstances by a figure who came to his door in a grey cloak and refused to give his name.
Between the child prodigy and the death scene, Mozart made decisions that were often surprising, sometimes reckless, and occasionally magnificent. He was not simply a genius who was fated to die young — he was a person who made choices, and many of those choices had consequences.
The Break from Colloredo: Freedom Against Security
In 1781, Mozart was employed as court musician to Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo of Salzburg — a position that offered stability, salary, and the kind of institutional protection that made a musical career survivable in 18th-century Europe. Colloredo was not a bad patron by the standards of the time. He allowed Mozart to travel, perform, and develop.
Mozart hated him. He found the constraints of court employment suffocating. When Colloredo was in Vienna in 1781 and refused to allow Mozart to perform for the Emperor, Mozart requested his dismissal. The Archbishop’s steward kicked him out — literally, according to Mozart’s account in letters to his father. He was free, unemployed, and living in Vienna on his own account for the first time.
The Constanze Decision: Against Leopold’s Wishes
Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, had invested decades in his son’s career and had very specific views about what kind of woman Wolfgang should marry — if he should marry at all. Constanze Weber was not that woman. She was from a musical family, but a modest one. Leopold was bitterly opposed.
Wolfgang married Constanze in 1782 without his father’s blessing. The marriage was, by most accounts, genuinely loving and mutually supportive. Constanze was an effective manager of their chaotic household finances and an advocate for Wolfgang’s work after his death. Leopold died in 1787 having never fully reconciled with his son’s choices.
The Requiem: Writing Music He Believed Was His Own
In the summer of 1791, a grey-cloaked messenger appeared at Mozart’s door with a commission: a Requiem, to be delivered anonymously, for an undisclosed patron. Mozart, already ill with what would prove to be his final illness, became convinced the commission was from Death itself — that he was writing his own funeral mass.
The patron was eventually identified as Count Franz von Walsegg, an amateur musician who intended to pass the Requiem off as his own work in memory of his wife. Mozart left the Requiem unfinished when he died. It was completed by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr, and the finished version was delivered to Walsegg — who did, briefly, claim authorship.
Try the Interactive Mozart Life Simulator
The Mozart simulator covers 8 decisions across his life: leaving Salzburg in 1777, the break from Colloredo, marrying Constanze, the Prague vs Vienna dilemma, joining the Freemasons, the decision about his dying father, accepting the Requiem commission, and the final question about what his choices meant. You commit before the reveal.
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