Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) showed such a prodigious talent for music in his early childhood that his father, also a composer, dropped all other ambitions and devoted himself to educating the boy and exhibiting his accomplishments. Between ages six and fifteen, Mozart was on tour over half the time. By 1762, he was a virtuoso on the clavier - an early keyboard instrument and predecessor of the piano-and soon became a good organist and violinist as well. He produced his first minuets at the age of six, and his first symphony just before his ninth birthday, his first oratorio at eleven, and his first opera at twelve. His final output would total more than 600 compositions. Much has already been said and studied in the popular media about Mozart's roguish lifestyle and apprehension of conformity. It was this aspect of his personality that never won him the support of royalty or the church, which, at that time, was critical to any composer's survival. As such, Mozart died young, ill, poor, and relatively unappreciated ... only to become the mostly widely acknowledged orchestral composer in history.

Mozart's last three symphonies appeared in just six weeks during the summer of 1788. Mozart was in dire financial straits at the time. Four years previously he had still been a fashionable celebrity, both as a composer and a pianist, but in the meantime Viennese society had "dropped" him completely. The last three symphonies may perhaps have been Mozart's last vain attempt to gain another foothold in the cultural life of Vienna.

The Symphony No.39 in E-flat Major, K.543 is one of Mozart's most joyous works. In the intervening centuries, countless poets and verbal rhapsodists have tried to ascribe a poetic or programmatic context to the work, but the symphony stands firmly on its own. Richard Wagner said of the piece, "The longing sigh of the great human voice, drawn to him by the loving power of his genius, breathes from his instruments. He leads the irresistible stream of richest harmony in to the hear of his melody, as though with anxious care he sought to give it, by way of compensation for its delivery by mere instruments, the depth of feeling and ardor which lies at the source of the human voice as the expression of the unfathomable depth of the heart."

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