Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have been a one of a kind genius, but he didn’t compose in a vacuum.
Portrait of Mozart by Johann Nepomuk della Croce
Today, we’re looking at ten fabulously talented composers whose sound worlds are very similar to Mozart’s.
We’ll also look at these composers’ connections to Mozart, and how they inspired him.
So, without further ado, here are ten great composers who wrote music that sounds like Mozart’s:
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Tesla Quartet | Joseph Haydn, String Quartet, Op. 33, No. 1
Haydn was born in 1732 and Mozart was born in 1756. Despite their twenty-four year age gap, both men were major inspirations to each other.
Unfortunately, not a lot of information exists about the day-to-day of their friendship. It’s likely that they met for the first time in the early 1780s after Mozart moved to Vienna.
Despite his colleague’s age, Haydn put Mozart on a pedestal.
Joseph Haydn
Haydn once wrote to musicologist Charles Burney after Mozart’s death, “I have often been flattered by my friends with having some genius, but he was much my superior.”
He also wrote to Mozart’s father, “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”
Mozart held Haydn in similar high regard. When Mozart wrote his six so-called “Haydn quartets”, he took inspiration from Haydn’s six op. 33 quartets.
When those quartets were published, Mozart included a lengthy, heartwarming dedication to Haydn, publicly asking him “to continue your generous friendship towards one who so highly appreciates it.”
Long story short, if you love Mozart and are looking for other composers who wrote similar works, you have to spend time with the music of Haydn.
Learn more about what Mozart’s thought of his colleagues.
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
Johann Christian Bach: Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 1 (1763)
Johann Christian Bach was Johann Sebastian Bach’s eighteenth (!) child.
His father was fifty years old when he was born. As a result, Johann Christian grew up in a world with very different musical tastes than his father had.
Johann Christian’s musical language relied on simplicity, restraint, and grace, placing it squarely in the style of the Classical Era.
Portrait of Johann Christian Bach in 1776 by Thomas Gainsborough
In 1762, Johann Christian Bach moved to London. Two years later, he met eight-year-old Mozart, who was in England on tour with his family.
Mozart took composition lessons from him for five months. Those months proved formative, and Johann Christian’s elegance and easy facility seemed to rub off on Mozart. In fact, Johann Christian Bach has been referred to by scholars as “the only true teacher of Mozart.”
In 1782, after Bach died, Mozart wrote to his father, “I suppose that you have heard that the English Bach is dead? What a loss to the musical world!”
Sir William Herschel (1738-1822)
William Herschel: Symphony n. 8 in C minor
Sir William Herschel was born in 1738 to an oboist and his wife. He was born in the Electorate of Hanover in Germany and moved to England when he was nineteen.
Over the course of his musical career in Britain, he headed bands, played organ professionally, and composed dozens of works.
William Herschel
In addition to being a talented composer, Herschel was also a man of science. He and his sister were renowned astronomers. In 1781, using cutting-edge telescopes, he discovered a new planet he named Uranus.
His dual careers in both art and science mark him out as an especially interesting figure of the Classical Era, a time when artists of all kinds were taking inspiration from the settled laws of physics and the natural world.
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799)
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf: Oboe Concerto in G major
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf was born in 1739 in Vienna, Austria, to a military tailor and his wife.
He began studying music as a young boy, and by the time he was eleven, he was playing in a local church orchestra.
Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf
When he was twelve, despite his youth, a German military man named Prince Joseph of Saxe-Hildburghausen hired him to play violin in his court orchestra.
Over the years, Dittersdorf bounced between various noble and royal courts. He also wrote an autobiography and finished it just three days before his death.
Dittersdorf was friends with the great musicians of his generation, and he played in a legendary string quartet in the mid-1780s. He and Haydn played violin, Mozart played viola, and Dittersorf’s student Johann Baptist Wanhal (see below) played cello.
Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Boccherini: Cello Concerto No. 7
Luigi Boccherini was born in Italy in 1743 to a cellist named Leopoldo and his wife.
Luigi began studying music at an early age, specialising in the cello like his father. The two of them moved to Vienna in 1757 when Luigi was fourteen.
Luigi Boccherini
A few years later, Luigi took a job at the court of Infante Luis Antonio of Spain, the younger brother of King Charles III. Luigi antagonised the king when he wouldn’t change a passage in his music that the king didn’t like. This rebelliousness against authority figures foreshadowed Mozart’s.
Boccherini’s music feels more Italian and Spanish than Mozart’s, featuring more freewheeling improvisatory lines. However, the work of both composers shares a fresh elegance and charming joie de vivre.
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799)
Buskaid: Symphonie Concertante in G major – Allegro – Chevalier de Saint-George
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born in 1745 in Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a wealthy 34-year-old French planter and his 17-year-old enslaved African servant.
When he was seven, Joseph Bologne was sent to France to be educated. At thirteen, he enrolled in a fencing academy and quickly became a star student. Famously, he won a much-ballyhooed match against a fencing master who had publicly scorned him due to his race.
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges
In addition to being one of the great athletes in Europe, Bologne was also extremely musical. His instrument of choice was the violin, but he also worked as a composer and conductor. In fact, he premiered Joseph Haydn’s Paris Symphonies in Paris in 1786.
He has since been nicknamed the Black Mozart, but that nickname diminishes his own extraordinary gifts and identity.
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)
Muzio Clementi: Sonata in F sharp minor op. 25 No. 5 by Leonardo Pierdomenico
Muzio Clementi was born in 1752 in Rome to a silversmith and his wife. His talent was obvious from an early age, and his father arranged for him to study music with a variety of accomplished teachers.
Muzio Clementi
By the time he was fourteen, he was working as a professional organist. An Englishman traveling through Italy named Sir Peter Beckford hired him to work and study at his estate, Stepleton House, in rural Dorset. Clementi stayed there until 1774.
In 1780, when he was twenty-eight, he embarked on a multi-year European tour. The following Christmas, he was invited to the rooms of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in Vienna to participate in a keyboard duel with Mozart. Mozart wasn’t impressed by him, but he also was prejudiced against Italians.
After his tour, Clementi returned to England, where he made a very successful career as a teacher, composer, music publisher, and piano maker.
Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759–1824)
Maria Theresia von Paradis – Overture to Der Schulkandidat – Premiere Recording!
Maria Theresia von Paradis was the daughter of Joseph Anton von Paradis, Imperial Secretary of Commerce and Court Councilor to the Empress Maria Theresa. She was born in Vienna in 1759, just three years after Mozart, and named after the empress.
A nearly fatal illness struck when she was a small child, resulting in her nearly losing her sight. However, her blindness did not keep her from studying music. She studied theory, composition, piano performance, singing, and more, using a special system of notation that she could touch.
Maria Theresia von Paradis
In 1783 she, like Clementi and Mozart before her, set off on a European tour. While she was touring, she began composing in earnest. She spent much of the 1790s composing, but eventually turned her attention to teaching, even founding a music school in Vienna in 1808.
Despite all of these great accomplishments, the piece she is most famous for – the “Sicilienne” – is not actually by her. But she composed many others!
In 1784, she played a piano concerto that Mozart had written for her (possibly the one we know today as the eighteenth piano concerto). Even though we can’t pinpoint the concerto with certainty, the fact that it exists proves his admiration for her talents.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 1, No.1, Allegro – Gryphon Trio
The earliest portion of Beethoven’s career overlapped with the tail end of Mozart’s, and both composers owed a major creative debt to Haydn. If you enjoy Mozart, chances are you’ll enjoy early Beethoven, too.
Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven
The piano trio above – Beethoven’s first – was written in 1795, a few years after Mozart’s death.
This trio won’t be mistaken for Mozart: it is spikier and more aggressive, with more daring harmonies. However, it does share a fleet-footedness and a clever mischief that Mozart would surely have enjoyed if he’d only lived a few more years to hear it.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)
Johann Nepomuk Hummel: Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major
Johann Nepomuk Hummel came to know Mozart in a unique way.
When Hummel was an eight-year-old child prodigy, he met the thirty-year-old Mozart, who was impressed by his talent.
Mozart offered to teach him composition and to provide free room and board. Hummel’s parents took Mozart up on his generous offer, and Hummel spent two very formative years with him.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
As an adult, Hummel worked for the Esterházy court, as well as in Stuttgart and Weimar, and transformed the business of music by advocating for musical copyrights and musicians’ pensions.
Unfortunately for Hummel, he had been born during a change in musical tastes. Initially he had been trained in the style of the elegant Classical Era. However, over the course of his life, as the Romantic Era unfolded, more tempestuous styles of music came into vogue. It was hard for many composers to make the transition in an organic way.
Hummel was once regarded as one of the greatest composers of his generation. However, nowadays, he’s rarely heard.
Nevertheless, it is still fascinating to listen to his works. They offer glimpses into how Mozart might have responded creatively to the musical trends of the early nineteenth century.
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