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Finnish (endonym: suomi [ˈsuo̯mi] ⓘ or suomen kieli [ˈsuo̯meŋ ˈkie̯li]) is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish.
Aug 31, 2024 · Finnish language, member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, spoken in Finland. Finnish did not achieve official status until 1863, and it, as well as Swedish, were designated the national languages of Finland in 1919. Learn more about the history and phonology of Finnish.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- Early life and works
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was an Austrian composer. Mozart composed music in several genres, including opera and symphony. His most famous compositions included the motet Exsultate, Jubilate, K 165 (1773), the operas The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787), and the Jupiter Symphony (1788). In all, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces of music. Today he is widely considered one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
opera: From the “reform” to grand opera
Learn about the “reform” of opera in Mozart’s time.
symphony: The mature Classical period
Read about Mozart’s contributions to the genre of the symphony.
How old was Mozart when he began playing music?
Mozart most commonly called himself Wolfgang Amadé or Wolfgang Gottlieb. His father, Leopold, came from a family of good standing (from which he was estranged), which included architects and bookbinders. Leopold was the author of a famous violin-playing manual, which was published in the very year of Mozart’s birth. His mother, Anna Maria Pertl, was born of a middle-class family active in local administration. Mozart and his sister Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) were the only two of their seven children to survive.
The boy’s early talent for music was remarkable. At three he was picking out chords on the harpsichord, at four playing short pieces, at five composing. There are anecdotes about his precise memory of pitch, about his scribbling a concerto at the age of five, and about his gentleness and sensitivity (he was afraid of the trumpet). Just before he was six, his father took him and Nannerl, also highly talented, to Munich to play at the Bavarian court, and a few months later they went to Vienna and were heard at the imperial court and in noble houses.
“The miracle which God let be born in Salzburg” was Leopold’s description of his son, and he was keenly conscious of his duty to God, as he saw it, to draw the miracle to the notice of the world (and incidentally to profit from doing so). In mid-1763 he obtained a leave of absence from his position as deputy Kapellmeister at the prince-archbishop’s court at Salzburg, and the family set out on a prolonged tour. They went to what were all the main musical centres of western Europe—Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Mainz, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Paris (where they remained for the winter), then London (where they spent 15 months), returning through The Hague, Amsterdam, Paris, Lyon, and Switzerland, and arriving back in Salzburg in November 1766. In most of these cities Mozart, and often his sister, played and improvised, sometimes at court, sometimes in public or in a church. Leopold’s surviving letters to friends in Salzburg tell of the universal admiration that his son’s achievements aroused. In Paris they met several German composers, and Mozart’s first music was published (sonatas for keyboard and violin, dedicated to a royal princess); in London they met, among others, Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son and a leading figure in the city’s musical life, and under his influence Mozart composed his first symphonies—three survive (K 16, K 19, and K 19a—K signifying the work’s place in the catalog of Ludwig von Köchel). Two more followed during a stay in The Hague on the return journey (K 22 and K 45a).
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After little more than nine months in Salzburg the Mozarts set out for Vienna in September 1767, where (apart from a 10-week break during a smallpox epidemic) they spent 15 months. Mozart wrote a one-act German singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, which was given privately. Greater hopes were attached to his prospect of having an Italian opera buffa, La finta semplice (“The Feigned Simpleton”), done at the court theatre—hopes that were, however, frustrated, much to Leopold’s indignation. But a substantial, festal mass setting (probably K 139/47a) was successfully given before the court at the dedication of the Orphanage Church. La finta semplice was given the following year, 1769, in the archbishop’s palace in Salzburg. In October Mozart was appointed an honorary Konzertmeister at the Salzburg court.
Fennoman movement, in 19th-century Finnish history, nationalist movement that contributed to the development of the Finnish language and literature and achieved for Finnish a position of official equality with Swedish—the language of the dominant minority.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Finnish Wikipedia (Finnish: Suomenkielinen Wikipedia) is the edition of Wikipedia in the Finnish language. By article count, it is the 27th largest Wikipedia with about 580,000 articles as of September 2024. [1] Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia in Finnish which is still updated. [2]
Finnish literature refers to literature written in Finland. During the European early Middle Ages, the earliest text in a Finnic language is the unique thirteenth-century Birch bark letter no. 292 from Novgorod. The text was written in Cyrillic and represented a dialect of Finnic language spoken in Russian Olonets region.
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Jan 22, 2022 · Overview. Finnish is spoken in Finland, as well as some other areas. Finnish (suomi in Finnish) is a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It is not an Indo-European language.
