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Today's Featured Biography
Mozart
 Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the band of Archbishop Sigismund, the reigning Prince of Salzburg, and it was probably in compliment to his master that he bestowed on the youngest of his seven children the name of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Sigismundus. Born on January 27, 1756, this child was destined to make the name of Mozart famous wherever music is known; and surely no more beautiful life--beautiful in itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in its short course were produced--has ever been lived by anyone of those to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a great architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the wonderful genius of a Mozart.
Infant prodigies very often turn out to be nobodies in after-life. But Mozart was an exception; and though he might well have been called "the marvellous boy," his latest works--and he died at the early age of thirty-five--were undoubtedly his grandest and most perfect. He began very early to compose. One of these first attempts was a concerto so difficult that no one could play it; but the child undauntedly said, "Why, that's the very reason why it is called a concerto; people must practise it before they can play it perfectly."
Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been taken by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played th...
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