Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart grew up in Salzburg under the regulation of his
strict father Leopold who also was a famous composer of his time. His abilities
in music were obvious even when Mozart was still young so that in 1762 at the
age of six, his father took him with his elder sister on a concert tour to
Munich and Vienna and a second one from 1763-66 through the south of Germany,
Paris and London. Mozart was celebrated as a wonder child everywhere because of
his excellent piano playing and his improvisations.
In 1769 he became the concertmaster of the Archbishop and was knighted by
the Pope in Rome. Working in Salzburg he nevertheless travelled around Europe to
meet other composers and orchestras. But in 1781 after a dispute with the
Archbishop he left Salzburg and went to Vienna where he married Constanze Weber
from Mannheim. In Vienna he also started his friendship with Franz Joseph Haydn
and a time of many work pieces. In the last year of his life, for example, he
wrote one of his masterpieces, "Die Zauberflöte". Although some of his operas
were successful he could not make money from this and died in poverty at the age
of 36, having even on his last day worked on a "Requiem". He was buried in a
communal grave which could not be precisely identified years later.