Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1787
Mozart composed Eine kleine Nachtmusik on August 10, 1787. We know the exact date because he was obsessive about cataloging his work. What we don't know is why he wrote it, who commissioned it, or whether it was ever performed during his lifetime. It appears in his personal catalog as a five-movement serenade, but only four movements survive. The second movement is simply gone — lost, destroyed, or possibly never separated from a pile of manuscripts that Mozart's widow sold by the pound after his death to pay off his staggering debts.
Mozart died at thirty-five with approximately three thousand florins in debt — the equivalent of several years' salary. He earned well but spent catastrophically, on clothes, billiards, an apartment that was far too expensive, and a lifestyle designed to convince Viennese society that he belonged among them despite being a former child prodigy from Salzburg who never quite fit in. His letters reveal a man of startling vulgarity and warmth — he wrote to his cousin about bodily functions in detail that would make a fraternity pledge blush, and to his wife about love with a tenderness that makes you forgive the rest.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik — 'A Little Night Music' — is the most effortlessly charming piece of classical music ever written. The opening theme is so natural it feels like it must have always existed, like Mozart didn't compose it but simply overheard it. That's his signature trick: making the impossibly crafted sound inevitable. Every phrase leads to the next with a logic so perfect you can't imagine any other note in any other place. And he did it in a day, between working on Don Giovanni — one of the greatest operas ever written — and whatever he did that evening, which based on his letters probably involved billiards and wine.
The Romanze second movement is often played at weddings, which Mozart would find amusing given that his own marriage was a source of constant gossip, financial anxiety, and genuine affection in roughly equal measure. Constanze Weber was not the brilliant match his father wanted. She was the match Mozart chose, and he chose her stubbornly, joyfully, and without regret. The Romanze sounds like someone who knows exactly what happiness costs and has decided it's worth it.