classical period wolfgang amadeus mozart

Afterward Leopold lamented that their gift for the performance was a mere 24 guineas (around 250 florins), but a second court appearance in May made them 24 more. Wolfgang accompanied Queen Charlotte in an aria-she was a fair singer and clavier player-and improvised melodies over Handel bass lines. Bach, Abel, and George’s favorite, German-born Handel. Leopold found them the warmest and most welcoming sovereigns they had yet encountered: “Their easy manner and friendly ways made us forget that they were the King and Queen of England.”ĭuring the first audience, the king presented Wolfgang with sight-reading challenges, works by Wagenseil, J. Besides occupying the British throne he was also elector of his ancestral Hanover, so the court had a distinctly German tone. The queen was German-born, the king’s family German. At that point George III was nearly twenty-six, Charlotte nearly twenty-one. When the Mozarts arrived in London, Handel was five years in his grave many in the city remembered his performances. They would stay in London for an initially glorious, then exasperating fourteen months.

The children’s reputation had preceded them: five days after their arrival, Wolfgang and Nannerl played before King George III and Queen Charlotte at Buckingham House.

Discovering that their Parisian attire attracted cries of “Bugger the French!” from street urchins, Leopold hastened to equip the family with English clothes, including fashionable round hats. They reached London on the twenty-third, staying for a few days at an inn in Piccadilly before settling into cheaper rooms above a barber’s in St Martin’s Lane. On the way the family all got wretchedly seasick Leopold wrote home that he was champion at vomiting. In her diary, Nannerl (aka Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) wrote that at Calais, on the way to London in April 1764, they observed “how the ocean ebbs and waxes.” For the Channel crossing, Leopold hired a private boat and picked up four more paying passengers.

Classical period wolfgang amadeus mozart