ADJOA_ANDOH CHRIS_ADDISON COMM DAVID_MCVICAR DR_FLORA_WILLSON DR_ROBERT_GREENBERG EDWARD_GARDNER FEMALE_PERFORMER GOLDA_SCHULTZ JAMES_HAWES JANE_GLOVER KARLA_CROME LUCY_CROWE MALE_PERFORMER SHEILA_HANCOCK STEPHEN_FRY

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
On June 4th, seven days after his father’s death, Mozart's pet starling drops dead in its cage. Well… Oh my goodness. Mozart goes bonkers with grief over the bird. 

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
The bird is put in a little bird casket. He gets his friends together, and they stage a, a funeral procession while singing hymns. He writes a 24-line eulogy in its memory. 

STEPHEN FRY
“Here rests a little bird called Starling. A foolish little darling. This bird, this bird in a cage.” There is a symbolism there, isn’t there. This bird in a cage is precisely what young Mozart was, but it’s also, if you like, a displacement of the funeral for his father. “He was still in his prime when he ran out of time. My sweet little friend, came to a bitter end.” 

STEPHEN FRY
Inside him is this unresolved problem, that he never satisfied this giant man in his life. And there's a new Mozart who's born out of that death, if you like. That new Mozart is not the same delightful charmer that he once was. He is a deep dark figure now. And it sets him on a road to unimaginable greatness. 


COMM
This is the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A child prodigy, a flawed human and a composer the like of which the world has never seen.

DR FLORA WILLSON
I mean, where would we be without Mozart? He is classical music. 

COMM
Now, with the help of experts, Mozart lovers and world class musicians…

GOLDA SCHULTZ
Take one! 

COMM
Using his private letters and original manuscripts, it’s possible to piece together who he really was. A man who battled society… 

ADJOA ANDOH
Your world is not this, your world is this. That’s it. 

COMM
Battled his family…

STEPHEN FRY
You hear his rage against the world. “You must go this way.” “No, I won’t!” “Yes, you will!” “No, I won’t!”

COMM
And ultimately battled himself… 

CHRIS ADDISON
He is complicated, Mozart, and slightly crazy. 

CHRIS ADDISON
There’s a grand history of child stars who go off the rails. 

COMM
A genius who channelled all this to chart the human condition. 

GOLDA SCHULTZ
I’m going to be an artist regardless of how it is received. I’m still going to create art. That’s bad ass mic drop moment right there. 

LUCY CROWE
Mozart’s music makes us question why we’re put on this earth. What is it all about? It makes us question our existence I think. 

DAVID MCVICAR
It, it really is mind-blowing just how far above that bar Mozart is. 

COMM
Mozart is a living comfortably in Vienna with his wife and young son Karl. 

COMM
At 32, he’s become rich and famous, by rejecting the traditional court system that has kept musicians in the service of aristocrats. But as he’s about to discover, it’s a precarious existence.

JAMES HAWES
Mozart’s known throughout Europe. Everything's going his way, but the whole world he lives in is about to change. Not just for him, but for everybody.

COMM
In 1788, war breaks out between the Habsburg monarchy and their Turkish neighbours.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
Austria is suddenly at war with the Ottoman Empire by themselves. It's a disaster financially, militarily, and as it turns out, artistically.

COMM
The conflict between the two great empires stretches back over a century. And memories of the last time the Ottomans besieged Vienna are still fresh in people’s minds. 

COMM
This time, the population aren’t taking any chances. Those who can, flee the capital.

JAMES HAWES
The all-powerful Emperor Joseph leaves town to go to the front line. That means all the patronage gathered in his hands has gone. And suddenly, cultural life basically grinds to a halt. And with fear of war what people want is light relief.

COMM
If those who’ve stayed behind in Vienna are hoping for some distraction, they aren’t going to get it with Mozart's latest opera.

COMM
Plunged into emotional turmoil after his father’s death, Mozart has produced his bleakest work to date.

DR FLORA WILLSON
This is music to make you recoil. It's dark. And then the strings, this off kilter rhythm. It’s creepy.

DAVID MCVICAR
I clench my fist when I listen to this music, because I feel that's what it's saying. It's the sound of death. It's the sound of hell.

DR FLORA WILLSON
Don Giovanni is a dark story. It’s all about a man who has bedded thousands of women, he brags. This is a man who commits sexual assault again and again and again. 

DR FLORA WILLSON
And one of the first things that happens is he murders the father of a woman he's trying to seduce. 

DR FLORA WILLSON
There is real violence, there is real aggression in this opera. And from that point on, he continues to try and seduce women, but it's clear, he's on the highway to hell.

COMM
At the end of the opera, Don Giovanni is confronted by the stone spectre, the ghost of the murdered father. 

MALE PERFORMER (GHOST)
[SINGING IN ITALIAN] You invited me to dine with you. Here I am. 

DAVID MCVICAR
It’s payback time, guys. Payback is coming.

COMM
In Mozart’s previous opera, The Marriage of Figaro, the aristocratic villain gets to repent. But Mozart is no longer interested in salvation. When the statue demands atonement, Don Giovanni remains defiant. 

MALE PERFORMER (DON GIOVANNI) (ARCHIVE)
Repent! No!

GOLDA SCHULTZ
Will you ask for forgiveness? Will you submit to good sense and become a better person? He screams emphatically.

DAVID MCVICAR
Pentati, no! Pentati, no! That’s why he goes to hell.

MALE PERFORMER (DON GIOVANNI) (ARCHIVE)
Aaargh!

GOLDA SCHULTZ
This opera, you definitely see a darker side of Mozart. There's so many motifs of his life story playing out. And the idea of the father dying right at the beginning. His dad's died, someone who he's had such a trying relationship with. Someone who said to him, “You have to change your ways. You have to be the way I want you to be.” It feels like Mozart's trying to figure out his life story. It’s like, am I gonna be like Don Giovanni or am I gonna change?

COMM
But Mozart’s dark introspection doesn’t go down well in Vienna. 

DR FLORA WILLSON
The aristocratic audiences are kind of looking for light relief, and Don Giovanni is many things, but it is not light relief. 

JAMES HAWES
It's just not right for the new zeitgeist, because no one in Vienna wants to hear a tale of death and punishment and sin when they're out fighting a war. And it’s a flop.

COMM
The news reaches Emperor Joseph on the frontline.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
And the emperor says, “You've given the audience meat that they cannot swallow”, and Mozart just, he gets so hardcore, and he says, “Well, they’re just going to have to chew longer. They’re just gonna have to chew on this until they can swallow it.” Hell, that’s ballsy! And that’s where you see the child in him come out. 

STEPHEN FRY
He can't believe that the Viennese don't see how great Don Giovanni is, and it is great. It’s one of the greatest things mankind has ever done. And he knows that. Why should he change? But like it or not, if you're not going to sell your work, you're not going to feed your family. 

COMM
But Mozart refuses to pander to popular taste. And he soon faces the consequences. 

ADJOA ANDOH
Music, concerts... suddenly it all starts to dry up, it starts to collapse and he in his confidence in his financial security has accrued debts that he now cannot service.

JAMES HAWES
He writes all these begging letters in which he clearly seems to believe, genuinely, that the next success is just around the corner.

STEPHEN FRY
“I would not have the courage to appear before you. I’m forced to admit I cannot possibly repay the money you leant me.”

ADJOA ANDOH
“Your true friendship and brotherly love makes me so bold as to ask you for a great favour.”

STEPHEN FRY
“I still owe you eight ducats. Although I'm currently not in a position to pay this back to you, I ask you to help me out with a hundred florins. Until next week.”

ADJOA ANDOH
“If you were to extend to me such love and friendship as to support me for one or two years with one or two thousand florins.” 

COMM
Mozart is broke. But he parties on. 

CHRIS ADDISON
He's spending like a sailor still. It's like he doesn't understand the position that he's in, or there's some other part of him that understands it and wants to forget it, wants to drink his way through the night and ignore it.

COMM
But Mozart can only hide from reality for so long.

KARLA CROME
Constanze’s is looking at the finances of the household and she cannot rein Mozart in. They’re running out of money and they’re running out of it fast. And this is when the cracks begin to show in the marriage.

DAVID MCVICAR
The relationship between Wolfgang and Constanze was not always harmonious. There was a lot of dangerous liaisons on both sides.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
In all likelihood Mozart had been having affairs all along with singers. He’s a party animal and Constanze knew this was going on. And whatever issues were going on in the marriage, she didn’t wanna be dealing with him on a daily basis. 

COMM
Constanze has had enough, exhausted and ill with worry, she needs to get away from Mozart to recuperate. 

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
We still don’t know for sure what has made Constanze ill, whatever the causes are, with her doctor’s recommendation, she goes to the nearby Spa town of Baden. And her absence does not help her husband.

KARLA CROME
When Constanze goes, Mozart just unravels. She's the backbone of their family. He is so dependent on her and now she's gone. 

COMM
Mozart is now alone in wartime Vienna, contemplating his failed opera and his failing marriage. And it seems the world around him is falling apart. 

COMM
In July 1789, extraordinary news reaches Vienna – France has erupted in violent revolution.

JAMES HAWES
This long brewing French pressure cooker finally blows, and the Bastille is stormed. The French Revolution has started. And, of course, Mozart welcomed the idea of revolution, as did most liberals in Europe, because he believed it was going to be this whole new world of hope and brotherhood. 

COMM
Vienna‘s ruling class are less enthusiastic. Emperor Joseph’s sister, Marie Antoinette, is under arrest in Paris. In Vienna, there is a conservative backlash, and the liberal reforms that had made the city so appealing to Mozart are reversed.

JAMES HAWES
The lights go out on the joyful, forward-looking Vienna that Mozart knew and where he was a superstar.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
Mozart is living in a very changeable time and it’s having a very negative effect on his life and on his career. 

COMM
Mozart is plagued by paranoia. He becomes suspicious that Constanze is having an affair.

KARLA CROME
“Dearest little wife, let me talk candidly. You know, I am glad when you are having fun. I truly am. I only wish you wouldn't make yourself so cheap. You are a bit too familiar with N N. A woman has to behave properly, otherwise people will talk. Make effort, my love. Don't torture me with jealousy.”

GOLDA SCHULTZ
Oof, Mozart is a man in the middle of a trauma storm. The world that he lives in is chaotic. His relationship, it's not solid ground. This is someone adrift.

COMM
Desperate for work, Mozart takes on someone else’s reject; a cheap operatic comedy that his rivals have already turned down.

CHRIS ADDISON
He takes on an opera here that other people have turned down because it's mucky, because they think that it's a grubby little story. But he turns it into one of the most remarkable operas ever written.

COMM
It’s a story about female infidelity. Cosi Fan Tutte translates as ‘They are all the Same’. 

DAVID MCVICAR
Cosi is bleak. Cosi is about how awful relationships can get. He knew what this was about. He knew love and how love can go wrong sometimes. 

CHRIS ADDISON
The best thing in Cosi Fan Tutte is the best thing, full stop, in music ever. And that is a trio in the first half called ‘Soave sia il vento’.

CHRIS ADDISON
It's just three vocal lines with the most simple instrumentation to go along with it. The strings underneath, they’re like the waves in the wind….

COMM
The two sisters believe their fiancés have gone off to war. They promise Don Alphonso they will remain faithful.

CHRIS ADDISON
It’s incredibly moving, but the beautiful drop of lemon juice in the sugar is - it's a joke. Because Don Alfonso’s lying to them. They’ve not gone off to war. These women are being taken for fools.

COMM
Little do they know, their fiancés have returned in disguise, to test their resolve.

DR FLORA WILLSON
Come Scoglio is an aria and she’s singing about how her love for her fiancé is fixed like a rock. It cannot be moved, no matter the weather.

FEMALE PERFORMER (FIORDILIGI) (ARCHIVE)
As a rock remaining motionless against the winds and against the storm 

GOLDA SCHULTZ
Come Scoglio is hecka hecka awkward. It's super high, super low. And it’s about these extreme emotions that she’s trying to navigate. 

FEMALE PERFORMER (FIORDILIGI) (ARCHIVE)
Respect the example of fidelity, and may your vile hopes not make you bold yet

GOLDA SCHULTZ
In come these weird triplets that…

GOLDA SCHULTZ
This is a battle cry, this is – she's just trumpeting her way like she's Joan of Arc. 

DAVID MCVICAR
She finishes that aria in, in a state of like, I will stay faithful, I will not fall in love with this guy. But she does.

COMM
Towards the close of the opera, the two women give in to the seduction.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
And when she finally does succumb, it’s actually quite heart-breaking to watch her say yes.

FEMALE PERFORMER (FIORDILIGI) (ARCHIVE)
Righteous heaven, righteous heaven, righteous heaven. Cruel man!

GOLDA SCHULTZ
And then she says, ‘You’ve won, do with me what you will’.

FEMALE PERFORMER (FIORDILIGI) (ARCHIVE)
You’ve won! Do with me what you will.

DAVID MCVICAR
Cosi is not the souffle that many people think that it is. It has a disillusionment, a bitterness, a sense of dread because it’s embedded in life experience. It’s heartfelt. He knew that pain. Does his own sex life play into this? Yes, I think it does. Does he just distrust Constanze? Definitely. All of that doubt, all of that jealousy, all of that rage is so much part of what he's writing about.

COMM
In 1790, Emperor Joseph dies after a long illness. In febrile wartime Vienna, many are pleased to see the back of him. But for Mozart, it's another heavy blow. 

JAMES HAWES
As a little child, Mozart knew Joseph. He's always been there as the man to impress, the man who can make you or break you. And he's been making Mozart for the last few years, and suddenly he's gone and his replacement, Leopold, does not like Mozart, just because Mozart was the favourite of his predecessors. Mozart is left sponsor-less.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
And it’s just, can someone just give me a break? 

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
From 1788 to 1790, Mozart has a series of bad years. Bad financially, bad in terms of his health, bad in terms of his emotional health. He wrote very little music.

STEPHEN FRY
We see in Mozart this year of not producing things. The energy has gone out of him and that is such a classic symptom of depression.

STEPHEN FRY
“I can't describe what I've been feeling. A kind of emptiness. If people could see into my heart, I should almost feel ashamed. To me, everything is cold. Cold as ice.”

COMM
450 miles away, the great dynasties of Europe are gathering together. In Frankfurt, Leopold II is about to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

JAMES HAWES
Everyone's invited, except Mozart. Haydn’s going to compose something for it. Salieri is going to compose something for it. But Mozart, the greatest composer in Vienna, is absolutely out in the cold.

ADJOA ANDOH
How much humiliation can this man take? It is something about not being invited to Leopold's coronation and his decision, sod it then, I'm gonna go anyway. He has to be where the noise is, he has to be at the centre of everything.

JAMES HAWES
And what he does is quite extraordinary. He decides to mount an alternative coronation concert at his own expense. It’s almost insane.

ADJOA ANDOH
So, what does he do? He takes everything he can of his wife's that is pawnable and pawns it.

KARLA CROME
These are the most beautiful possessions she has. A lovely silver hairbrush, a mirror, beautiful trinkets given to her as a present. And he sold it all because he wants to get to Frankfurt. It's a reckless slap in the face.

COMM
On the Eve of the Coronation, Mozart sets out for Frankfurt. His mission: show the world he’s still a force to be reckoned with.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
There's a degree of self-delusion, a degree of desperation, but also a fabulous degree of optimism, if we think about it.

COMM
Mozart plans to showcase a brand new work full of turbulent emotion. 

EDWARD GARDNER
The 40th Symphony is the closest Mozart gets to what we feel romanticism is. This idea of expression, ultimate expression of emotions through music. 

EDWARD GARDNER
This theme we hear at the beginning of the 40th Symphony is one of Mozart's best known musical gestures, isn't it? Ya, da da, da da da, da da da, da.

EDWARD GARDNER
In the 40th Symphony, you really feel the emotions from Mozart pour out into the music. And it mirrors this time in his life of desperation. 

EDWARD GARDNER
This feeling of despair at the opening, the grief, the anger. He’s incredibly confident in what he wants to achieve and has a kind of swagger about the music. He’s managing to bring all these elements together to create such an extraordinary masterpiece. 

COMM
But for a musical genius, Mozart’s timing is decidedly off. 

JAMES HAWES
There is actually a major military parade happening at exactly the same time. So, no one turns up. It's a complete failure, in fact, a debacle.

EDWARD GARDNER
When Mozart and turned round and saw the auditorium was, at best, half full, he must have been devastated. But I wish I'd heard that performance because that's what that music is about, devastation and desolation. I bet he put some fire into it. 

COMM
Mozart has hit rock bottom. Constanze and Karl are gone. It’s time to decide what kind of man he wants to be.

KARLA CROME
He knows that he's messed up, and he writes to her and says, “I'm sorry. I'm going to get my act together and I'm going to sort this out.”

ADJOA ANDOH
“What a wonderful life we're going to lead. I will work and work so much, so that I do not end up in such a disastrous situation again.”

KARLA CROME
“When I wrote the foregoing page, one tear after another fell on my paper. But I must cheer up.”

ADJOA ANDOH
“Let catch them. There's an amazing number of kisses flying about. Oh, what the devil! I see a whole bunch of them. I just caught three. How delicious they are.”

GOLDA SCHULTZ
When he writes that letter, he's telling her something very profound. He's saying, I choose this family, I choose us and what we create. 

COMM
Mozart persuades Constanze to come home. She’s ready to give him a second chance.

KARLA CROME
They can acknowledge that they've had a really difficult year. But now they're gonna focus on the future, come together and be a family again. As a gesture to his commitment to his family and to his wife, Mozart buys back the toilette.

KARLA CROME
There’s a bit of optimism back in the family. 

COMM
Mozart vows that his wife and son, not his fame, will be his number one priority.

COMM
For years, Mozart’s resisted working for anyone. Now, he takes an assistant Kapellmeister position at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
Mozart says, “I'll take any job you give me, because I need to have something secure.” And Mozart comes back to life.

LUCY CROWE
It’s almost like the sun is rising and he’s seeing the light. And that’s where this beautiful piece of music has stemmed from. 

LUCY CROWE
Mozart was able to write this in a morning. And he uses the choir, like one voice. It's like one long incantation or prayer.

EDWARD GARDNER
You feel like the whole choir is a lung altogether. It feels like the biggest expression of community inside religion. It's extraordinary. 

STEPHEN FRY
It’s so held in and so controlled and then these moments of grace that rise from it. 

STEPHEN FRY
He must then think, “I’m Mozart again. I can do it.” 

COMM
Mozart now turns his back on the aristocrats of old Vienna and moves to a radical artistic commune. The Freihaus Theatre specialises in popular opera, sung in German.

DR FLORA WILLSON
The Freihaus is a new kind of theatre for Mozart. It's a place where anything goes. It's more bohemian, it's more relaxed, it's much more varied.

JANE GLOVER
Mozart would have felt completely at home in that and in a way he sort of found his niche. 

COMM
The theatre is run by larger-than-life empresario Emanuel Schikaneder. He specialises in ‘Sing Spiel’, popular shows closer to modern musicals than opera. He commissions Mozart to write one for him.

JAMES HAWES
Together they cook up a scheme for a completely new kind of opera. It's targeted at an audience which is a rumbustious, common place audience of people. 

COMM
Mozart and Schikaneder are both Freemasons – a brotherhood which promotes liberty, equality and fraternity. Enlightenment ideals which come together in their latest production The Magic Flute.

EDWARD GARDNER
The Magic Flute is a completely subversive kind of theatre. It’s so removed from that erudite old school Italian opera.

CHRIS ADDISON
I think The Magic Flute is basically Mozart in opera form. It’s all there. So, it’s got high moralising, it's got low comedy, weird, esoteric Masonic interests, baddie aristocrats, goodie enlightenment figures, and it's all in one space. It's like it's, it's Mozart.

JAMES HAWES
The opening three chords, which is the Masonic knock on the door, bang, bang, bang, right through to the end, The Magic Flute is ridden with symbols of the Masonic world.

DAVID MCVICAR
Who’s knocking on that door. The door opens and you just know you are in for a great show. Here, here’s my hand. Let’s go on this journey. 

FEMALE PERFORMER (QUEEN OF THE NIGHT) (ARCHIVE)
My heart is on fire with vengeance 

COMM
The Magic Flute tells of the evil Queen of the Night and her gentle daughter, Pamina. The Queen demands that Pamina commit a terrible crime, but Pamina refuses.

DR FLORA WILLSON
The Queen of the night is really angry. She is unleashing this furious power in her famous aria. Where it’s just this torrent of notes.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
These F’s just pop on out like gunfire. Bop, bop, bop.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
When I’m on stage in that scene, I try really hard not to grin like an idiot because I'm just so excited. As Pamina, you get the full force of that experience, but this is just all directed at me and I'm so happy. I love it.

COMM
The Queen of the Night delivers an ultimatum to Pamina – commit murder or you are no daughter of mine.

DAVID MCVICAR
All these high notes are not about display. It's drama, it's energy. The way to sing it correctly is to drive those notes like knives into the heart of Pamina. These are the stakes. This is what I'm demanding. This is what you will do. And then Pamina is left with this dilemma. What do I do?

MALE PERFORMER (PRINCE TAMINO) (ARCHIVE)
Open wide the gates of terror and let me set forth. 

COMM
Pamina refuses to obey her mother. Instead, she risks everything to save the man she loves, Prince Tamino. 

GOLDA SCHULTZ
Tamino! Stop! I have to see you! 

GOLDA SCHULTZ
And then there's a silence of them just seeing each other. And so epic.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
My Tamino! Oh, what happiness! 

MALE PERFORMER
My Pamina! Oh, what happiness!

GOLDA SCHULTZ
You’re singing an interval of a major sixth in Mozart's music. This is the holy interval. We're going from human to absolute divinity in that little jump. And when she does it, she goes. Just that. The whole world stands still. It's sort of his way of saying she's really the one who saves the day, not the prince. And sometimes when I think of his and Constanze’s relationship, I feel like that's how he sees her. She saved him. That's such a love letter, if ever I saw one. And he did it with two notes.

DAVID MCVICAR
There's a lot of Constanze in Pamina. The respect and love that he had for her finds its way into the musical characterisation. He loved her. She must have been a remarkable woman.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
The Magic Flute’s the story of what it takes to go from the space of naivety and childhood into adulthood. Two young innocent people who choose to be together and choose to walk together, knowing all the good and the bad. That’s a very profound story of what it is to be in a relationship.

COMM
The opera is a huge success. The Magic Flute is staged almost a hundred times in its first year. 

CHRIS ADDISON
It’s funny that a piece that is so optimistic ultimately has come out of a really dark time. It’s the thing that, that ends that dark time for him. And it's optimistic for him because it's a huge triumph after his world has fallen apart. He's figured out that his real future lies with entertaining the public, which fits perfectly with the post French Revolution times that he's now living in. It’s like he’s figured it out, but he’s just figured it out a touch too late.

COMM
Mozart is now back in demand and working flat out to repay his debts, when a commissioner arrives from a mysterious patron who wishes to remain anonymous.

JANE GLOVER
And he said he wanted Mozart to write a requiem for which he would pay handsomely. But nobody was to know that he was writing it. He was to write it in secret.

COMM
A Requiem Mass is a Catholic funeral text set to music. 

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
Well, Mozart knows who's commissioning his requiem. It's being commissioned by someone named Count Franz Von Walsegg. Von Walsegg’s hobby is to commission known composers to write pieces of music that he can then pass off as being his own. And Mozart was willing to play the game because he still needs cash. And so, in his rekindled creative period, he’s trying to do too much at the same time.

DR ROBERT GREENBERG
He’s overworking. And at other times in his life when he’s overworked he’s gotten sick, and he’s getting sick now as well.

COMM
Soon, Mozart takes to his bed with a fever. He calls his student, Sussmayr, to help him continue working on the Funeral Mass.

KARLA CROME
Mozart’s working tirelessly on this requiem. He’s completely focused on it. And he’s trying to tell his student how it's going to end.

COMM
From his sick bed, he manages to write these eight bars of The Lacrimosa. 

ADJOA ANDOH
In that moment of absolute transcendence and those voices just… And it stopped. It's gone. 

SHEILA HANCOCK
It’s so pure. It’s grief personified. 

ADJOA ANDOH
“I shall die, now, when I am able to take care of you and the children. Now I will leave you unprovided for.”

KARLA CROME
Mozart's condition gets much, much worse and a doctor is sent for. 

COMM
On the 5th of December 1791 at 12.55 in the morning, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies. He is 35 years old.

COMM
Five days later, Mozart’s friends, the cast of The Magic Flute, gather to sing his unfinished Requiem.

STEPHEN FRY
This piece of music suddenly takes on a new meaning, it’s a requiem for the dead and he is the dead.

LUCY CROWE
His last piece of humanity, his last offering of beauty to the world.

COMM
Decades after Mozart’s death, there is one final reconciliation. Mozart’s sister Nannerl and his wife, Constanze haven’t spoken for almost 40 years. Now they agree to meet.

DR FLORA WILLSON
Nannerl is willing to hand over hundreds of letters, so that Mozart’s full story can be told. It’s extraordinary that we only have Mozart’s story today because of these two women. That for all that this is a story about one man and what he could create, the imagination that he had, the confidence he had, without these two women, we wouldn’t know so much. And of course, without the stories about Mozart, there would be no genius.

JANE GLOVER
For me, he is sort of beyond the summit. Erm… Like Shakespeare and like Michelangelo, you know, he's somewhere above the rest of the human race.

GOLDA SCHULTZ
When I listen to the music, it just works on an almost cellular level. And in that way you experience yourself in a different way and you get to know yourself better. 

DAVID MCVICAR
What he had to say was cut off. And er… I don’t know what to say. We didn't get enough of him. He should have been with us for longer. Can you cut please?

COMM
If Mozart’s brilliance has inspired you to appreciate classical music more, explore the fascinating world of classical concertos and why Mozart excelled in composing them, visit bbc.co.uk/mozartgenius and follow the links to the open university to watch the animation.