The world of Mozart was evolving, very dramatically. He was assigned the Konzertmeister post to court in Salzburg. Though the position came without pay, it's hard to overestimate the importance of this opportunity. This was a 13-year-old boy given the job as a composer and conductor to the archbishop-prince of one of the Holy Roman Empire 's main principalities.
Mozart paired with the grand old man of the world of libretto, the 74-year-old poet Metastasio. This wasn't an opera, this wasn't an oratorio, it was a 'dramatic serenade' that was performed successfully on May 1 of that year at the enthronement. Sadly, while it was definitely of high quality and certainly significant at the period, it has not survived the test of time to claim a place in the general repertoire.
Mozart wrote the bassoon concerto at the age of 18, and it was his first concerto for a wind instrument. In this piece, Mozart gave his bassoon soloist a real run-out on the instrument, with fast, florid passages that are still something of a challenge today, never mind the much more unfavourable 1770s instrument.
Siegmund Haffner, approached them with a request for music for his sister’s wedding, Mozart happily obliged. Hard as we might imagine today, the resulting Haffner Serenade was planned to be played at Marie Elisabeth Haffner 's wedding on July 21, 1776 for talking, cooking, drinking guests. Once again, the Haffner Serenade is one of Mozart 's early achievements — a brilliant work, full of complexity and imagination, despite receiving little attention from the audience at its first performance.
1777 marked the beginning of a very long departure from Salzburg life. Mozart became deeply dissatisfied with his hometown and again requested leave. He became so irritated by yet another offer for leave that he dismissed both Mozart and Leopold, while Mozart agreed to leave in a pointedly laconic manner anyway. As a result, a carriage was hired and he set off — without his father but this time with his mother — on 23 September and left first for Munich and then for Augsburg.
A 16-year-old composer arrived at Vienna on 7 April 1787 newly. He was already acquainted with Mozart 's music by all accounts, and was excited to meet him. It's said he was playing music with him and he also had some lessons from him, probably. the name of the young composer was Ludwig van Beethoven.
The composer was called to Vienna the following March, where his employer, Archbishop Colloredo, participated in the festivities for Joseph II 's accession to the Austrian throne. Mozart, fresh from his adulation in Munich, was offended when Colloredo regarded him as a mere servant, and particularly when the archbishop forbade him to perform at Countess Thun's before the Emperor for a fee equal to half of his annual Salzburg salary. In May, the ensuing quarrel reached a head, Mozart attempted to withdraw and was rejected. Permission was granted the following month but the composer was dismissed in a grossly insulting manner, administered by the steward of the archbishop, Count Arco. Mozart decided to settle in Vienna as a freelance performer and a composer.
Mozart was infamous enough to be challenged to a duel by December. Another pianist had arrived in town, Clementi himself was a supremely respected pianist, and was invited to court on this occasion as part of the general merrymaking surrounding the presence of the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia. Mozart and Clementi were asked to become musical gladiators for the amusement of the court, and participated in a piano virtuosity contest, Mozart got off best and this certainly made his name the power of good.
Constanze gave birth to a baby boy named Raimund Leopold, but the Mozarts took a trip to Salzburg to see Leopold, leaving Raimund Leopold in Vienna as a young infant. Their son died when they were away, so the Mozarts left for Vienna.
Constanze delivered their second child, Karl Thomas, on September 21. Karl Thomas will live to the ripe old age of 74, unlike his brother Raimund. His parents moved house very early in his childhood, again. This time it was to the Domgasse which was much more salubrious. And salubriousness brought expense with it, with the flat costing a staggering 450 gilder a year for the Mozarts.
On 14 December 1784, Mozart became a Freemason, admitted to the lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit ("Beneficence"). Freemasonry played an essential role in the remainder of Mozart's life: he attended meetings, a number of his friends were Masons, and on various occasions, he composed Masonic music, e.g. the Maurerische Trauermusik.
In January 1786, Mozart had taken on a new commission for opera. Without doubt his decision was motivated by the appeal that came from the emperor himself, in memory of the sister of the emperor. The welcome sum of 50 ducats was given him by Emperor Joseph II itself. In addition, Mozart produced an opera, called The Impresario.
The Magic Flute was the last opera Mozart composed, it was premiered on 30th September 1791 - roughly three months before he died. Mozart himself conducted the orchestra, while the librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, sang the role of Papageno.
The Austrians were alarmed by the French thrust that reached all the way to Leoben, about 100 km from Vienna, and finally decided to sue for peace. The Treaty of Leoben, followed by the more comprehensive Treaty of Campo Formio, gave France control of most of northern Italy and the Low Countries, and a secret clause promised the Republic of Venice to Austria. Bonaparte marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending 1,100 years of independence. He also authorized the French to loot treasures such as the Horses of Saint Mark.
On the advice of his doctor, he moved to the small Austrian town of Heiligenstadt, just outside Vienna, from April to October 1802 in an attempt to come to terms with his condition. There he wrote the document now known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament”, a letter to his brothers which records his thoughts of suicide due to his growing deafness and records his resolution to continue living for and through his art. The letter was never actually sent and was discovered in the composer’s papers after his death. The letters to Wegeler and Amenda were not so despairing; in them, Beethoven commented also on his ongoing professional and financial success at this period, and his determination, as he expressed it to Wegeler, to “seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not crush me completely.” In 1806, Beethoven noted on his musical sketches "Let your deafness no longer be a secret – even in art."
After four years on the sidelines, Austria sought another war with France to avenge its recent defeats. Austria could not count on Russian support because the latter was at war with Britain, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire in 1809. Although Archduke Charles warned that the Austrians were not ready for another showdown with Napoleon, a stance that landed him in the so-called "peace party", he did not want to see the army demobilized either. On 8 February 1809, the advocates for war finally succeeded when the Imperial Government secretly decided on another confrontation against the French.
By 17 May, the main Austrian army under Charles had arrived on the Marchfeld. Charles kept the bulk of his troops several kilometres away from the river bank in hopes of concentrating them at the point where Napoleon decided to cross.
On 21 May, the French made their first major effort to cross the Danube, precipitating the Battle of Aspern-Essling. The Austrians enjoyed a comfortable numerical superiority over the French throughout the battle. On the first day, Charles disposed of 110,000 soldiers against only 31,000 commanded by Napoleon. By the second day, reinforcements had boosted French numbers up to 70,000. It was the first defeat Napoleon suffered in a major set-piece battle, and it caused excitement throughout many parts of Europe because it proved that he could be beaten on the battlefield.
In the ensuing Battle of Wagram, which also lasted two days, Napoleon commanded his forces in what was the largest battle of his career up until then. Napoleon finished off the battle with a concentrated central thrust that punctured a hole in the Austrian army and forced Charles to retreat.
Two commissions in 1822 improved Beethoven's financial prospects. The Philharmonic Society of London offered a commission for a symphony, and Prince Nikolas Golitsin of Saint Petersburg offered to pay Beethoven's price for three string quartets. The first of these commissions spurred him to finish the Ninth Symphony, which was first performed, along with the Missa Solemnis, on 7 May 1824, to great acclaim at the Kärntnertortheater.
Beethoven was bedridden for most of his remaining months, and many friends came to visit. He died on 26 March 1827 at the age of 56 during a thunderstorm. His friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, who was present at the time, said that there was a peal of thunder at the moment of death. An autopsy revealed significant liver damage, which may have been due to heavy alcohol consumption. It also revealed considerable dilation of the auditory and other related nerves.
Beethoven's funeral procession on 29 March 1827 was attended by an estimated 20,000 people. Franz Schubert, who died the following year and was buried next to him, was one of the torchbearers. He was buried in a dedicated grave in the Währing cemetery, north-west of Vienna, after a requiem mass at the church of the Holy Trinity (Dreifaltigkeitskirche). His remains were exhumed for study in 1862 and moved in 1888 to Vienna's Zentralfriedhof. In 2012, his crypt was checked to see if his teeth had been stolen during a series of grave robberies of other famous Viennese composers.
Beethoven then turned to write the string quartets for Golitsin. Of these "Late Quartets", Beethoven's favorite was the Fourteenth Quartet, op. 131 in C♯ minor, which he rated as his most perfect single work. The last musical wish of Schubert was to hear the Op. 131 quartet, which he did on 14 November 1828, five days before his death.
Creditanstalt, Austria's premier bank with major stakes across a variety of industries, becomes insolvent after being forced to assume liabilities from three other insolvent banks, triggering a cascading effect of bank failures across Central Europe. Creditanstalt represented 16% of Austria's GDP, and could not find another institution to guarantee liquidity. 140 million Austrian schillings were lost. The collapse of Creditanstalt caused the Bank of France, the National Bank of Belgium, the Netherlands Bank, and the Swiss National Bank to begin a run on the U.S. dollar for their gold reserves, and forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates from 1.5% to 3.5% to maintain the gold standards, which in turn contributed to the deepening of the Depression and the second round of banking failures in the U.S. during the summer of 1931.
On 21 December 1975, he led the six-person team (which included Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann) that attacked the meeting of OPEC leaders; they took more than 60 hostages and killed three: an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee and a member of the Libyan delegation. Carlos demanded that the Austrian authorities read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. To avoid the threatened execution of a hostage every 15 minutes, the Austrian government agreed and the communiqué was broadcast as demanded.
This explanation effectively placed the blame on the power plant operators. The UKAEA INSAG-1 report followed shortly afterward in September 1986, and on the whole also supported this view, based also on the information provided in discussions with the Soviet experts at the Vienna review meeting.
On 6 May 1992, Mate Boban met with Radovan Karadžić in Graz, Austria, where they reached an agreement for a ceasefire and discussed the details of the demarcation between a Croat and Serb territorial unit in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On April 23, 2014, Slim took control of Telekom Austria, Austria's biggest phone carrier, which has telcos in countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia and Belarus, under a 10-year agreement, was Slim's first successful business acquisition in Europe.