1791 Mozart's Last Year. H. C. Robbins Landon

"when genius gripped him, day and night were interchangeable"

The list of Mozart’s compositions in his final year (he died aged thirty-six) is quite extraordinary. For major works there were two operas, including The Magic Flute; the Clarinet Concerto (K. 622); Piano Concerto 27 (K. 595); the String Quintet in E Flat major (K. 614); and a fragment of another string quintet. He also produced some thirty-seven dances, two organ works, two Masonic pieces, the Ave Verum Corpus, a Kyrie, the incomplete Requiem, the Horn Concerto in D major (K. 412, unfinished); and the Adagio for Glass Harmonica.

Despite the Turkish war that had depressed concert going in the late 1780s, Vienna in 1791 was seen by later generations as a musical paradise, when several of the wealthiest houses still had their own orchestras. Many private orchestras were disbanded over the next twenty years, thanks to inflation. Nobles with their own orchestras were important patrons of Haydn; a generation later, Beethoven’s patron had a quartet. So Mozart was living in a time of plenty.