Mozart was an Austrian composer, widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. With Haydn and Beethoven he brought to its pinnacle the achievement of the Viennese Classical school. Unlike any other composer in musical history, he wrote in all the musical genres of his day and excelled in every one. His taste, his command of form, and his range of expression entitle him to be considered the most universal of all composers. At the time of his death Mozart was widely regarded not only as the greatest composer of the time but also as a bold and “difficult” one; Don Giovanni especially was seen as complex and dissonant, and his chamber music as calling for outstanding skill in its interpreters.

His surviving manuscripts, which included many unpublished works, were mostly sold by Constanze to the firm of André in Offenbach, which issued editions during the 19th century. But Mozart's reputation was such that even before the end of the 18th century two firms had embarked on substantial collected editions of his music. Important biographies appeared in 1798 and 1828, the latter by Constanze's second husband; the first scholarly biography, by Otto Jahn, was issued on Mozart's centenary in 1856. The first edition of the Köchel catalogue followed six years later, and the first complete edition of his music began in 1877.

The works most secure in the repertory during the 19th century were the three operas least susceptible to changes in public taste - Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte - and the orchestral works closest in spirit to the Romantic era - the minor-key piano concertos (Beethoven wrote a set of cadenzas for the one in D Minor) and the last three symphonies. It was only in the 20th century that Mozart's music began to be re-examined more broadly. Although up to the middle of the century Mozart was still widely regarded as having been surpassed in most respects by Beethoven, with the increased historical perspective of the later 20th century he came to be seen as an artist of a formidable, indeed perhaps unequalled, expressive range. The traditional image of the child prodigy turned refined drawing-room composer, who could miraculously conceive an entire work in his head before setting pen to paper (always a distortion of the truth), gave way to the image of the serious and painstaking creative artist with acute human insight, whose complex psychology demanded exploration by writers, historians, and scholars. But regardless of such shifting currents of interpretation, in public esteem and affection Mozart's place more than equals that of any other composer.