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 overtures offer a critical view of the development of the overture. From the Baroque, when overtures rarely had anything to do with the operas they introduced, to the early Classical, when overtures might share thematic material with their operas, to Mozart's innovation of actually foreshadowing the course of the opera within the overture, overtures like Mozart's 1790 masterpiece, Cosi fan tutte, K588, not only anticipates the finale, but also establishes the overture as a self-sufficient musical entity.

For his first wind concerto, Mozart chose to write for the bassoon. In fact, as many as four bassoon concerti by Mozart may have been lost, but the Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra in B-flat Major, K191 survives as the quintessential bassoon concerto. It was written in 1774 in Salzburg, probably for one of the bassoonists in the court orchestra, and displays a remarkable sympathy for what is rarely seen as a solo instrument. Mozart trusts the soloist with challenging passage work in the outer movements, yet still evokes an operatic lyricism in the middle movement.

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