The Talk of The Town

Londoners were accustomed to visits from great musicians, but in the spring of 1764, king and commoner alike were astonished by an eight-year-old named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Young Mozart’s fame had come before him, thanks to his performances in Vienna and Paris. He arrived with his father Leopold and his sister Nannerl, and almost at once they were summoned to the royal residence at Buckingham House, where they were greeted with what Leopold called “indescribable” hospitality. Riding through St. James Park a week later, they were recognized from the royal carriage, and, forgetting regal decorum, twenty-six-year-old King George III let down the window sash and nodded and waved heartily to the prodigy.

During Mozart’s second visit to the palace on May 19, the King tested the boy’s ability to play music by popular composers of the day–Karl Friedrich Abel, and Handel–at sight. He played the organ and the harpsichord, accompanied Queen Charlotte as she sang an aria, and improvised a melody based on a tune by Handel. On June 5 Mozart and Nannerl played a public concert in the Spring Gardens Room, and within three weeks Mozart was being promoted as “the most extraordinary prodigy and most amazing genius that has appeared in any age.”

About then Mozart met the Queen’s Music Master, the twenty-eight-year-old Johann Christian Bach, who had settled in London three years previously and now went by the name John Bach. The two took to each other at once. They played a harpsichord duet, taking turns playing a bar at a time, with Mozart sitting on John Bach’s lap, and then Bach started a fugue that Mozart finished.

But the relationship thrived on more than novelty. After a year in England, Mozart picked up vocal and symphonic techniques from John Bach. He wrote his first six piano concertos based on Bach’s sonatas and learned to subordinate theatrical effects to sheer beauty of phrase.