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How it all began....
Our love and
appreciation for Bavaria and Austria and its food, culture, music and
people have helped inspire all that is Cafe Mozart Restaurant. We the
Forchemer Family wish to share a little about the prodigy and genius -
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for whom we named our establishment.
A remarkable musician and composer whose legend continues to grow more
than two centuries after his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in
Salzburg, Austria in 1756. Before the age of four, he had exhibited such
extraordinary powers of musical memory and ear-sophistication that his
father, Leopold (a highly esteemed violinist and composer in his own
right) decided to sign young Wolfgang up for harpsichord lessons. Almost
from day one, the boy's reputation as an unexampled musical prodigy grew
faster than wildfire. At five, he was composing music; at six he was a
keyboard virtuoso, so much so that Leopold took Wolfgang and his sister
Maria Anna on a performance tour of Munich and Vienna.
At fifteen, Mozart was installed as the concertmaster in the orchestra of
the Archbishop of Salzburg. Things did not go over well; Mozart didn't get
along with the Archbishop, and relations deteriorated to the point where,
in 1781, he quit this lofty position and headed for Vienna - quite against
his father's wishes.
Now a grown man, Mozart initially thrived in Vienna. He was in great
demand as a performer, and composition teacher, and his first opera, The
Abduction from the Seraglio, was a hit. But life was not easy. He was a
poor businessman, and finances were always tight, especially after his
marriage to Constanze Weber. Political infighting at the Vienna court kept
him from the patronage that composers of the period so relied upon, and he
descended to a life of genteel poverty.
His music from the next decade came at a blistering prolific rate - was
only sporadically popular, and he eventually fell back on his teaching
jobs and on the charity of friends to make ends meet. In 1788 he stopped
performing in public, preferring to compose. But fortune never turned, and
when he died in 1791 at the age of thirty-five, he was buried in a
pauper's grave.
To say that Mozart was a composer of unequalled genius is scarcely
scratching the surface of this man's remarkable gifts. He wrote music -
complete and perfect, down to the last accent and inflection - as fast as
he could think, and this astonishing rate of production continues to
stupefy scholars today. In his short life, he composed of 600 works,
including 21 stage and opera works, 15 Masses, over 50 symphonies, 25
piano concertos, 12 violin concertos, 27 concert arieas, 17 piano sonatas,
26 string quartets...the list is endless. And what make these numbers
doubly unfathomable is the peerless craft with which each piece of music
was created. Mozart was a master of counterpoint, fugue, and other
traditional compositional devices of his day; more than this, he was
perhaps the greatest melody writer the world has ever known. His operas
range from comic baubles to tragic masterpieces. His Requiem, composed not
long before his own death, stands with Bach's St. Matthew Passion as the
supreme example of vocal music

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