An informative and entertaining audio-visual concert at the Konzerthaus, Berlin (2005) with the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra conducted and hosted by Hartmut Haenchen who analyzes the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most famous works. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Symphony No. 41 in C major "Jupiter", KV. 551 4:05 I. Allegro vivace 9:49 II. Andante cantabile 14:57 III. Menuetto. Allegretto-Trio 19:29 IV. Finale. Molto allegro Watch more episodes of the series "Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music": goo.gl/KBV6cR Subscribe to EuroArts: goo.gl/jrui3M When Europeans stopped believing in miracles, they developed an enthusiasm for child prodigies instead. And in the 18th century there was hardly other figure, however precocious, who seemed to be lit by as otherworldly a radiance as the young Mozart from Salzburg. Together with his father Leopold, who was a violin teacher and conductor at the Salzburg court, and his musically talented sister, "Volferl" travelled the length and breadth of Europein what appeared to be and endless tour, visiting princely courts, castles and places and performing not only for the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna but also for the French royal family at Versailles and for King George III in London. Even as a child and adolescent, Mozart was already writing Italian operas for Milan and Munich, in addition to publishing keyboard variations and violin sonatas, while the symphonies, Masses, serenades and string quartets that he composed all bear witness to a transcendent imagination and a mastery far beyond his years. "A phenomenon like Mozart is an abiding miracle that can never be adequately explained", Goethe noted in 1831, when recalling the occasion on which he had heard the seven-year-old Mozart in Frankfurt in 1763. "But how would the deity find an opportunity to work wonders everywhere unless He sometimes tried out His powers on exceptional individuals whom we admire even if we cannot understand where they have come from?" Conversely, there was nothing miraculous about the fact that as widely travelled and as famous a musician as Mozart should soon have felt out of place in his native Salzburg and believed that he was not being sufficiently challenged in the service of the prince-archbishop, with the result that in 1781 he finally risked breaking with his employer and fleeing from the confines and provinciality of the Salzburg court in order to settle in Vienna as a freelance artist without a fixed appointment. Vienna, he was convinced, wa "the best place in the world" for a man of his profession. During the ten years that were left to him he wrote his celebrated keyboard concertos, which he himself introduced to the world, and also his five greatest operas, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi tan tutte and Die Zauberflote. During this period he also composed extraordinarily profound chamber works, including string quartets and quintets, keyboard trios and his Clarinet Quintet. ANd in the summer of 1788 he completed his last three symphonies in E-flat major, G minor and C major, the last of them lated described as his "Jupiter" Symphony. Mozart bequeathed to an astonished posterity music of altogether otherworldly perfection, music which, dismayingly beautiful , is "not of this world". The Swiss theologian Karl Barth even susggested that the angels probably play Bach whenever they want to praise God but that among themselves and for their own pleasure they doubt play Mozart. Even though Mozart's life and works are uncommonly well documented, not least in the form of countless letters that attest to the composer's verbal wit and unconventional thinking, as a person and as a historical figure he reimains and insoluble riddle, and inexplicable phenomenon. "it often seems as if Mozart lived and loved and suffered with an all-consuming intensity," wrote Hermann Hesse, "and then again one has the impression that he did not live at all and that each provocation and appeal of reality immediately and without further ado became music in this blessed spirit.

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