playing music was a major form of entertainment. They didn't have radio or TV back then! You couldn't buy your favorite music on CD so you played it yourself, or hung around with someone who could play it.

To make it more interesting, people would make games of playing music. Only, these games weren't like football or basketball, these were improvisational games. Do you know what it means to improvise?

It was such an important part of a musician's training, that they would hold big competitions of improvisations where they would play as many variations of the same tune as they could. They would start with a simple tune, and play it as many different ways as possible.

When Wolferl was in his late teens, he and a famous pianist named Clementi, had a contest. Joseph, the son of Emperor Francis, brought the two together at court in Vienna and had them compete in a piano playing contest. It seems that Joseph liked to see Wolferl play special games with his music just like his father did. He bet on Wolferl. Can you guess who won?

Mozart wrote variations on a French folk tune that was popular at that time. It was known then as Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. Today the song is know by a different name, in fact it's known by a couple different names. We've provided a page with MPEG versions of the variations, and one with MIDI versions. The MIDI page just goes to show you that musicians still love to improvise variations.