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Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) composed his last three symphonies in the space of six weeks during the summer of 1788, working at a speed that still defies explanation. His fair-copy manuscripts are famously clean, with almost no corrections, suggesting the music arrived on the page close to its final form. When he dedicated six string quartets to Haydn in 1785, he described them as the fruit of "long and laborious effort", a rare admission that composition cost him anything at all. Haydn told Mozart's father they were the greatest quartets he had heard. Mozart was thirty-five when he died.

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