Seven Great Opera Overtures in Full Score

by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The sheer beauty, perfection, and profundity of Mozart's music continue to astonish and delight listeners two centuries after the composer's death. Although Mozart wrote with incredible versatility in every musical genre, his operas, for many, stand highest among his achievements. This volume contains the composer's greatest operatic overtures, enormously popular with music lovers worldwide, including those unfamiliar with the operas themselves. Heard regularly in concerts and on recordings, these overtures are justly famous in their own right.
In addition to the overtures from two early works of freshness and youthful exuberance — Idomeneo and The Abduction from the Seraglio — this collection includes the overtures from five world-famous The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , Cosi Fan Tutte , The Magic Flute , and La Clemenza di Tito .
Music lovers will treasure this attractive, inexpensive collection, reproduced in full score from an authoritative early edition.

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 1998

About the author

Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, the Austrian composer, toured Europe with his son, child prodigy, noted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who gracefully and imaginatively refined the classical style with symphonies, concertos, operas, Masses, sonatas, and chambers among his 626 numbered works.

The comic plays of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais inspired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to operas.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart prolifically influenced the era. Many persons acknowledged this pinnacle of piano and choral music. His popularity most endures.

Mozart showed earliest ability. From the age of five years in 1761 already competently on keyboard and violin performed before royalty. At seventeen years in 1773, a court musician in Salzburg engaged him, who restlessly traveled always abundantly in search of a better position.

Mozard visited Vienna in 1781; Salzburg dismissed his position, and he chose to stay in the capital and achieved fame but little financial security over the rest of life. The final years in Vienna yielded his many best-known Requiem . People much mythologized the circumstances of his early death. Constanze Mozart, his wife, two sons survived him.

Mozart always learned voraciously and developed a brilliance and maturity that encompassed the light alongside the dark and passionate; a vision of humanity, "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute," informed the whole. He profoundly influenced all subsequent western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote on his own early in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Franz Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."