Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) Symphony No. 38 in D Major, K. 504 "Prague" Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, the son of a court musician, Leopold Mozart, whose important book on the study of the violin was published in the same year. He spent his precocious childhood in a series of concert tours that took him to the cities of Austria and Germany, to Paris and to London, greeted wherever he stayed with curiosity and wonder. The boy had remarkable ability as a keyboard-player, as a violinist and as a composer, and all these gifts were displayed, in conjunction with the less remarkable talents of his elder sister, Anna Maria, known in the family as Nannerl.

It was in the 1770s, in particular, that Mozart began to feel more than usual impatience with his surroundings. In 1772 the old Archbishop, an indulgent patron, had died, to be succeeded by a more modern churchman, Hieronymus von Colloredo, son of the Imperial Chancellor and a man thoroughly in sympathy with the ecclesiastical reforms to be initiated by Joseph II. As an employer the new Archbishop was unsympathetic, while Salzburg itself had its own inevitable provincial limitations, compared with the obvious and seductive attractions of the capital, Vienna.

In 1777 Mozart left his position in Salzburg, where he had been appointed Konzertmeister, to seek his fatune elsewhere. Leopold Mozart was not given leave of absence, although he was told that he too could leave for good, if he wanted, a course he was too prudent to adopt. Mozart set out with his mother for Paris, taking in , on the way, his father's native city of Augsburg and, more fruitfully, Mannheim, where he spent some months, learning from the famous orchestra there, an army of generals, in the words of one contemporary, and enjoying the company of a young singer, Aloysia Weber, with whom he planned a wildly impracticable tour of Italy.