Mozart

Toured Europe from the age of six, dead in Vienna at thirty-five, buried in an unmarked common grave. In the twenty-nine years between he wrote more than six hundred works and pushed nearly every form of his day to its limit.

The hard thing about Mozart is that he sounds easy. The notes are clean and the phrasing is even, so there is nowhere for roughness to hide — which is why performers are afraid of him. His real revolution was in opera: in Figaro several people sing their own separate thoughts at once and the music stays legible. Nobody had managed that before him and few have since. For the quickest way in, start with the first movement of the D minor Concerto, K. 466, one of the rare places he writes the shadow directly.