Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, as the son of Anna-Maria and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, Austria. Leopold and wife Anna-Maria had eight children, out of the eight Wolfgang and his sister were the only children to survive birth. At the age of five, he began composing minuets and had learned how to play the clavier, the piano, the violin, and the organ very well at age six. Also at the age of six Mozart had written five short piano pieces and by age nine he composed a few symphonies. His father educated him in music and in what schools taught. He was a proficient sight-reader and improviser in music. He wrote sonatas for the harpsichord and the violin. At the age of twelve, he wrote the opera buffa La Finta Semplice. In 1769 he was appointed the concertmaster to the Archbishop of Salzburg. A few months later the Pope made him the Chevalier for the Order of the Golden Spur. In that very year, he composed his first operetta called Bastien und Bastienne.
             In 1777, Mozart and his mother went on a concert tour. At the age of twenty-one, he traveled to Mannheim which was the music capital of Europe because of their magnificent orchestra. He fell in love with Aloysia Weber. Leopold immediately directed them to go to Paris. Anna-Maria Mozart died in Paris in July 1778. He also had another bit of bad news when Aloysia rejected him. Both of those events made him return home in Salzburg in 1779. While Mozart was at home, he composed a lot of sonatas, symphonies, concertos, and two masses. These works show refined style and mature understanding of the music media for the first time in his career. When Mozart commissioned and composed the opera Idomeneo, re di Creta in 1781, the archbishop was prompted to invite Mozart to his palace in Vienna. When he arrived, a series of court intrigues and the exploitation of him from the court made Mozart decide to leave. I in that very year Mozart married Constanze Weber; she is the si...