I've just heard someone claim that while Beethoven brought about a musical revolution, Mozart didnt really change anything. Do you think this is true?

Dude, he invented Serialism. Of course he was (and this isn't a joke, check out 4th mvt of Symphony no 40). I reckon his harmonies were pretty interesting for the time, my conductor often pointed out (when we were playing a Mozart and Hayden symphony) all the things which Mozart did which Hayden would never think to do. Some people call him the first Romantic composer.

When Mozart died, this marked the end of the baroque period.

Car Expert

Yes, he's famed for being a Baroque composer who wrote so many piano sonatas years before the piano had been invented... .

That's what my music teacher told me last week... I could be wrong though.

Car Expert

This is a matter of opinion rather than fact. The only way to decide is to investigate the arguments yourself and form your own opinion. I find that it seems that Beethoven was 'more' revolutionary; but Mozart certainly wasn't unrevolutionary either, he did a lot for the development of music .

Mozart invented new ensembles. He wrote the first piano quartets (p, vn, va, vc) and the first work for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. In both of these he was followed but not surpassed by Beethoven and other composers. He didn't invent the keyboard concerto but he did transform it and wrote the majority of the great Classical works in the genre. Again, Beethoven was much influenced by them; his third piano concerto in C minor was written in conscious imitation of Mozart's great work (no 24) in the same key (look at the two opening themes), which B. greatly admired. M.'s most important innovation was the string quintet with two violas, in two of which (C major, G minor) you can hear some of his finest music; these also were imitated, though not to the same extent. He was not the first composer to write for the clarinet, but no earlier works and few later ones approach the stature of his concerto and quintet. He was the first composer since the Renaissance to treat the wind ensemble as a suitable medium for serious art music: his C minor Serenade (2 ob, 2 cl, 2 bn, 2 hn) is a miniature symphony, still unsurpassed in wind ensemble music and matched only by his own Serenades in Eb and Bb. The next work for wind that treats the instruments with similar skill and seriousness is Janacek's "Mladi" (fl, ob, cl, bcl, bn, hn), written some 140 years later, and still described by many players of wind instruments as "the best wind music not written by Mozart".

Mozart showed us lots of new things. If they have not been widely copied, it is mainly because he did them so well that other composers lacked the confidence to challenge him.

"Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated."
-- Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (1960)


I think music before Mozart and afrte him , are like two sides of a coin ...