Was Mozart the most productive composer who ever lived?

Hi, it’s Guillermina here, product specialist at Datawrapper! This week, I invite you on a journey through Mozart’s life and work — not just as music, but as data. How much did he write? When? And in which genres? It turns out, there’s a fascinating story hidden in the numbers.

It’s a bold question, but looking at the numbers, definitely one worth asking. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at 35 years old, just a few weeks short of his 36th birthday, yet he left behind more than 600 works spanning virtually every musical genre of his time. He wrote operas, symphonies, concertos, piano sonatas, quartets, quintets, church masses, divertimenti, even music for mechanical clocks. His output wasn’t just abundant, it was brilliant.

What makes Mozart’s productivity so extraordinary is not only the total number of works, but the speed and consistency with which he produced them. At the age of five, while most children are still learning to read, he was already composing piano pieces. In his book "Mozart: A Life," the author Paul Johnson says that Mozart learned how to read music before he learned how to read actual words. By age 10 he had completed symphonies, masses, and even theater music; as a teenager in Salzburg, he wrote masses and sacred choral works in astonishing numbers. By his twenties in Vienna, his focus shifted to opera, with Idomeneo, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. In his very last year, 1791, he wrote The Magic Flute, the Clarinet Concerto, and began his famous Requiem — a single year that could easily define another composer’s entire career.

If you take a closer look, you’ll see that Mozart’s compositions saw a big drop at the age of 24. He wrote less than usual because he was stuck in a tough situation: He had a low-paying job in Salzburg with the Archbishop Colloredo, who gave him few chances to grow and treated him more like a servant than a composer. Mozart felt trapped and frustrated, but when he finally moved to Vienna, his creativity and career took off.

Another difficult moment came at the age of 34. During that time, Mozart was struggling with money, worried about debts, and his wife was sick. All of this left him depressed and tired, and it showed in his music — he composed far less than usual that year.

If we look by genre, clear patterns appear. Sacred music dominated his youth, piano and chamber music stayed with him throughout, and his operas were clustered in periods when big commissions came in. Unlike many composers who stuck to one specialty, Mozart kept a balance between different types of music, always producing at a high level.

Across 35 years of his life, Mozart wrote over 600 compositions. That averages to about 17 works every single year of his life, from childhood through to his final months. To put that into perspective, Bach produced around 1100 works across a much longer lifespan of 65 years. So one could say that Mozart kept pace with Bach’s productivity (an average of 17 works per year), even though he only had half the time to write in.

So, was Mozart the most productive composer who ever lived? In total numbers, Bach wins. But Mozart started younger, worked just as fast, and compressed an entire lifetime’s output into 35 years. Had he lived as long as Bach, would he have surpassed him in total output? We’ll never know — but the thought makes Mozart’s short, brilliant career all the more extraordinary.

I hope you enjoyed this journey through Mozart’s compositions! See you next week for a new Weekly Chart by our co-CEO David.