January 27th: Mozart

10 things you might not know about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born 27 January 1756.

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was baptised Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. His family called him Wolferl.
2. A child prodigy, he was composing music by the time he was six years old. It's said he could write musical notes before he could write words. By eight, he was writing symphonies; at twelve, he wrote a mass - Misa Brevis in G, and an opera at fourteen, Mitridate Re di Ponto.
3. As a child, he could also listen to a complicated piece of music and write it down from memory. While visiting the Vatican, Mozart heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere performed in the Sistine Chapel and afterwards reproduced the whole score, which had never been written down outside the Vatican before. Pope Clement XIV was so impressed that he gave the boy the Papal Order of the Golden Spur.
4. Mozart's father was a violin teacher and a composer in his own right. A Trumpet Concerto and the Toy Symphony were among his works.
5. His appearance was not as impressive as his musical talent. Tenor Michael Kelly remembered him as "a remarkably small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine, fair hair of which he was rather vain." A childhood dose of smallpox left him with a bad complexion. His biographer, Niemetschek, wrote that he didn't look like a genius at all, except, perhaps for his "large intense eyes".
6. Mozart had a fondness for toilet humour, as evidenced by some of his letters and recreational compositions. In the 1990s, it was speculated that he might have had Tourette's syndrome, But Tourette's syndrome experts say that there is no credible evidence for this.
7. Mozart was a Freemason. He was admitted in 1784.
8. The "K" numbering of his works comes from the cataloguing of his works in the 19th century by by Köchel.
9. When the manuscript of Mozart's last work, the unfinished Requiem, was displayed at the 1958 world's Fair in Brussels, someone tore off and stole a corner of the second to last page. The words "Quam olim d: C:" were written on it. These are thought to be the last words Mozart ever wrote, which is probably the motive for the crime. The fragment was never found and to this day nobody knows who stole it.
10. The idea that Mozart believed the mass was for his own funeral is probably a myth which came from a play written by Peter Shaffer in 1979 about the composer. In the play, a mysterious messenger comes and places the order for the Requiem, and Mozart gets the idea, in the play, that he is writing it for himself.

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