Has anyone else noticed this about Mozart ....

Maynard Solomans's Mozart biography is excellent. I won't insult your intelligence by reading it to you,but I will summarize something from it that goes to your point. Mozart had to run away from a father who wanted to use him. When Mozart lived at home,in Saltzburg,he wrote stuff by the numbers. When he finally ran away to Vienna,he listened to his own(and his wife's) council. In Vienna,he became friends with Franz Joseph Haydn,an older person. The line of seperation between Mozart's young style and his mature style was the "Hayden Quartets" a set of six string quartets he dedicated to Haydn. Up untill then,Mozart would copy out stuff from his head and publish it. The Haydn Quartets were the first things he worked hard on. In a letter home,he compared their composition process to child birth. ps.Soloman's Beethoven biography is excellent as well.

Pragmatist is right, Mozart lived a very interesting albeit short life. His influences changed through the years, he traveled through a lot of Europe and his sound changed with the different region he was in- or I should say was influenced by what he heard in different areas. And after his mother died thing got different yet again. There is an innocence that is very apperent in his early work, and so much more content in his later works- though I enjoy both. The music world really would be different had he lived longer, his contributions would be even more vast and he possibly could have cataloged a lot of his work(no one knows for sure how much music he wrote, a lot was lost). Mozart was/is a very interesting composer, his father had a lot to do with him becoming a legend and at the same time didn't allow him to write as he wanted to. Then the ultimate would be having the ability to here the master himself perform some of his work, it is rumored that he was an astounding pianist and violinist and couldn't play enough! We should thank our lucky stars for the recordings we have of Rachmininoff(a window in time vol 1 & 2 come to mind) and many others who we heard there interpretation of the music, as they intendid..... But that's another thread all together.

Listen to a lot more classical music, beginning with Bach (arguably the progenitor of the Classical period)through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn to Schumann and Brahms (beginning the Romantic era}. Please pay lots of attention to lesser, and lesser known, composers of this time as well. Then, when you can clearly see what this towering master contributed to Western musical progression, how melody and emotional expression, humor and pathos, flowed effortlessly through his music unlike anything that came before--or since--you may repent the words "elevator music." The clarinet concerto you dismiss so lightly was Mozart's last completed work, a composition of wonderful energy and subtlety, a beam of light coming at a very dark time in his life. Listen to his Piano Concerto #9, written when he was a boy, for an aching expression of sadness that just doesn't seem possible from one so immature. Why does the "Magic Flute," his burlesque show, contain some of the most sublime and haunting music we enjoy today? The point I'm trying to make here is that Mozart's creative genius was obviously not bounded by his age, circumstance or conscious efforts to become "serious." He simply had the tap on all the time. Listen--when you hear him, you will know him.