Leopold Mozart – Famous Father of Musical Genius, Little Known Renaissance Man
While most of the day was spent in beautiful Nuremburg with the Plus 3 group, I felt my personal visit to the Mozarthaus was much more memorable. But a few blocks from our hotel, Mozarthaus was the home of Leopold Mozart, father of musical genius and perhaps the most well known classical composer of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. While Wolfgang Mozart’s life is most famous and studied, it is senior Mozart’s life that is depicted in the once house, now turned museum.
As a musician trained in classical music for many years, I have always maintained an appreciation for the arts and for younger Mozart’s accomplishments, but knew little of his father, known by his full name as Johann Georg Leopold Mozart. I knew of Leopold’s own accomplishments as an accomplished violinist, authoring one of the most respected treatises for the violin, but other than that, I was in store for surprise with what I learned. Although he dropped out of university because of poor attendance, Leopold was a well-educated man; he spoke a few languages, like his son Wolfgang, he was a novelist and writer, an acquaintance of contemporaries such as the Brothers Grimm, and even a scientist, dabbling in biology and botany. It seems that Leopold Mozart indeed fit the category of a “Renaissance man” – being well versed and knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects with an equally capable set of skills.
Bringing Leopold Mozart’s accomplishments to a modern societal context, it seems that some scholars are narrow-minded. I have always found a well-rounded education to be an essential life value, and to me, a scholar is not worthy of his title unless he is equally versed in a wide range of topics and able to acceptably communicate his thoughts socially. While Leopold Mozart may be a name of the past, his attitude towards learning should be a model for today’s students.