Mozart Fans Only

George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra is a good interpreter of Mozart. Just picked up Symphonies 35, 40 and 41 on CD. The recordings are from the late 50's/ 60's. Well recorded.

'Mozart led a pretty rough life, and only wrote one piece in a minor key.'

Can you clarify about this minor key claim, Mozart wrote in a minor key much of the time, so this claim is puzzling to me. Whether he wrote in major or minor had little, if anything at all, to do with his personal life.
Although Mozart was broke most of the time, he typically had money coming in due to the self promotion of his concerts, his private commissions and his posts to the courts. He was employed nearly all of his life. Mozart was just notoriously bad at saving money but compared to his contemporaries, he did pretty well financially. What Mozart did suffer from was an insecurity of self image due to his having been scarred by small pox from an early age.

You are correct. More major than I thought. An acid flash from the '60s. Major or minor, please take that with a grain of salt as far as happiness. Minor = imho, sadness/disquiet/troubled/glass half empty. Yep, small pox scars doesn't help. If he made $$ and spent it unwisely, we still have a money issue, no? He fared better than most, but was impecunious most of his life...poor? No, but always needy for the $$.

The composer who actually went insane was Hugo Wolf, though one could make a case for Schumann as well.

Learsfool, Let's not forget Hans Rott, who eventually was institutionalized, having run through a train waving a pistol and shouting that Brahms was trying to kill him. I'm pretty sure that qualifies.