I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name. –Joseph Haydn, to Leopold Mozart.

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 Symphony No. 10 in G major, K.74, was probably written during his first journey to Italy in the spring of 1770. The symphony is scored for two oboes, two horns and strings, and is really an overture in the fast-slow-fast Italian style, with the first two movements played without a break. No tempo assignments appeared in the autograph score, but the Italian overture form made frequent appearances in Mozart’s works and easy enough to distinguish. The autograph also bears the remark "Ouverture zur Oper Mitridate" (Overture to the opera Mitridate) by the hand of Johann Anton André, which is struck out except for the word "Ouverture". An early publisher of Mozart’s works, André was under the impression that this piece was originally planned as an overture to Mitridate, re di Ponto (which has an overture of its own, different from this symphony).