What day is your birthday?

Frédéric Chopin and his family always said that he was born on 1st March, 1810. However the church baptismal records state that he was born a week earlier, on 22nd February.

What day would you like your birthday to be? My name's David and I think I would quite like to have been born on 1st March too, as it is St David's Day, patron saint of Wales.

When we think of a child-genius, it is natural to think of Mozart. He was performing and composing at the age of five. But other composers also began very early. And some even surpassed his considerable feats.

Did you know that Chopin wrote pieces from the age of seven that were much more demanding to write and play than many of the pieces that Wolfie wrote, even in his maturity? In fact, if you were to purchase a copy of Chopin's Earliest Pieces and compare it with a copy of Chopin's Easiest Pieces, you would find that there is not much overlap, because some of Chopin's earliest pieces are quite difficult to play and are written in quite complex, and accurate notation.

Chopin is also quite a different composer from Mozart in another way: while Mozart wrote in all musical genres of his day (as several of the great composers have done), Chopin wrote almost entirely for the piano. Even when he wrote for orchestra, it was for piano and orchestra.

There is a lot of wonderful music to enjoy from the twenty-seven or so years that Chopin was composing music. But the Scherzo in B Flat Minor is a particular favourite of mine, played here in a very resonant acoustic, by Konstantin Bogino.

Who Am I?

Guten Tag. Today is my birthday. Do you know who I am? I was born on 27th January, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria. I died in December, 1791, just a few weeks before my 36th birthday.

In my short life I wrote over 600 pieces of music. My father put some of the first pieces I wrote into a book for my sister, which is called Nannerl's Music Book. You can find a copy of these first pieces here, which is a special internet site from Germany, which contains copies of all of my music. You might like to download the pages and try them out. Some of them are easy, but some are harder than they look!

Here is a short extract from a film about me called Amadeus, which is my middle name. Do you like the laugh they gave me?