Mozart
Mozart… well, I’m sure everybody already has lots of preconceptions about Mozart. He is the archetypal classical composer. People who don’t even listen to classical music except accidentally can recognize a Mozart piece. Everyone knows Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to the point of being completely and utterly sick of it.
Mozart’s music is generally light-spirited, agile, strongly melodic, and strongly classical. There isn’t much variation in speed or dynamics (the posh word for changes in volume) and it is put together using pretty strict, classical style guidelines. Many people find his music emotionally cold because of this. They consider more it’s more for the head than the heart. When starting to listen to classical, his are some of the easier pieces to get as they are musically “clean”, you can really hear what is going on.
As you probably already heard somewhere lots of times and promptly forgot, Mozart didn’t live a very long life. He died before the turn of the century (the 18th century, that is) and so never got to experience the romanticism that took off with Beethoven.
Musical Snippets
Symphony No. 40, 1st movement - This is yet another ridiculously famous piece by old Wolfgang. I read a list of “fake lyrics for classical music” on Usenet once and they claimed that you should set the words “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a Mozart! Shoot him down, shoot him down, shoot him down.” to the beginning of this first movement. Now I can’t stop thinking about it when I’m listening (it’s not as bad as the one for the last movement though) (buy at Amazon)
Symphony No. 41, 4th movement - This is a very grand final movement to Mozart’s last symphony. You can kind of hear him edging towards the more emotionally free romantic style which arrived about ten or twenty years after he died. Those initial four notes are what most of this movement is constructed from, twisted and expanded and extended. (buy at Amazon)
I need more Mozart! There are tonnes of samples around the web though. Just don’t listen to the Wikipedia ones. As of Jan ‘07 they are mostly horrible synthesized renditions…