Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met Johann Christian Bach during the Mozart family’s stay in London in 1764–1765, when Mozart was eight years old. Bach spent many hours with the young prodigy, teaching him composition for about five months and playing together with him at the keyboard. Leopold Mozart strongly encouraged his son to model his work on Bach’s music, and Mozart soon absorbed Bach’s elegant and melodically graceful style.
Johann Christian Bach’s instruction in London had a profound and lasting impact on Mozart’s musical development. Mozart later arranged three of Bach’s Op. 5 sonatas into keyboard concertos, frequently acknowledged the artistic debt he owed to Bach, and even incorporated thematic references to Bach’s opera La calamita de cuori in his own Concerto K.414. Mozart’s early symphonic writing, particularly his treatment of wind instruments, also reflects Bach’s teaching. Upon Bach’s death in 1782, Mozart described it as “a loss to the musical world,” underscoring the importance of Bach as the closest figure to a true composition teacher he ever had outside his family.
