The Austrian composer who toured Europe as a child prodigy and then, in a short and crowded life, poured out operas, symphonies, and concertos of such grace, balance, and feeling that he became the very model of natural musical genius — and whose early death in 1791 bred the lasting myths of a poisoning rival and a pauper's grave, neither of which the evidence supports.
By the age of six, Mozart was already a touring marvel, playing for empresses and kings while his father carried him across Europe like a wonder of the age. By thirty-five he was dead, leaving more than six hundred catalogued works and an unfinished Requiem on his desk. Into that short life he packed operas, symphonies, concertos, and chamber music that listeners have never stopped loving. His death in 1791 then bred two stories the world clung to: that a jealous rival named Salieri poisoned him, and that he was flung into a pauper's grave. Both are false. The play and film 'Amadeus' fixed the murder legend in modern memory, but no good evidence supports it, and Mozart most likely died of illness. His grave was a plain common one, ordinary for non-aristocratic Vienna at the time, not a disgraced mass pit. The real Mozart was neither murdered nor an outcast. He was a working master who made perfection sound easy.