Four Jacob's Ladders

 

I’ve been a music student since I was eight years old. I was assigned my first simplified arrangement of Mozart’s work by age ten. Even then, I could tell you several things about the most famous composer of the classical period: He was a child prodigy who died very young. He was horribly underappreciated during his lifetime. He was extremely poor, and buried in a pauper’s grave. Nearly all of this is wrong. Mozart WAS a child prodigy. He was 35 when he died; very young by today’s standards, but 35 was actually the life expectancy for a male European in the 1700’s. Mozart was famous – like rock star famous – his entire life. His income as a music teacher, performing artist and imperial musician left him comfortably well-off. He was buried in a communal grave in the Cimetière Saint Marc, Vienna, not because he was poor, but because it was the fashion at the time.