Meet Mozart: The Freelancer Who Was Kicked Out the Door

A childhood spent on the road

He was composing by five. From six he was on tour — his father took both children to Munich, then Vienna, then across Europe for three years, performing for courts that wanted to see the prodigy blindfolded at the keyboard.

At fourteen in Rome he heard Allegri's Miserere, which the Vatican had kept to itself, and wrote it out from memory afterwards.

The literal kick

In 1781 he walked out on the Archbishop of Salzburg and his salary, to make a living in Vienna from concerts, pupils, publishers and commissions. He was one of the first major composers to attempt it. The break was not dignified: the court steward dismissed him with a kick.

What followed was the great decade — the Haydn quartets, Figaro, Don Giovanni, the last symphonies — and near-constant money trouble. He earned well in his best years and was still writing begging letters to a fellow freemason.

Prague, and a starling

Vienna was fickle; Prague adored him. He wrote home that everyone there was whistling tunes from Figaro.

The letters are the other surprise. His surviving family correspondence is full of scatological jokes that Victorian editors quietly removed, and his expense book records a pet starling that could sing a phrase from one of his own concertos — and a funeral he held for it.

Almost everything you have heard about the end is wrong

He was buried in a common grave. That was ordinary Viennese practice under Joseph II's burial reforms, not a sign that he died a pauper.

Salieri did not poison him. That story runs from a Pushkin play to an opera to a film, and there is nothing under it.

The Requiem was genuinely unfinished, completed by his pupil Süssmayr, and which bars are Mozart's is still argued over. The cause of death is simply unknown — more than a hundred diagnoses have been proposed from the surviving descriptions of his last illness. And while he was dying, The Magic Flute — written for a suburban popular theatre, not a court — was playing to full houses across town.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you are thinking about leaving something secure to work for yourself. He did it first and it cost him, and he will be honest about both halves of that.