Music fans should not forget to celebrate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday today (January 27th), despite 253 years not being a particularly important anniversary.
This is the claim of Eric E Harrison of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, who suggested that Mozart's impact on music was so great that his birthday is always worth remembering.
"Mozart is still worth making a fuss over two and a half centuries later because he was a prodigy … and because in just three decades he produced a prodigious amount of music," he remarked.
During his 38-year lifespan, Mozart wrote more than 600 pieces of music, including concertos for violin, clarinet, flute, bassoon and piano, numerous sonatas, masses and operas.
Joseph Haydn, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Ludwig van Beethoven are among the great musicians to have been influenced by his works, while he ranked first in a Classic FM list of the top ten best composers.
