Who is this Mozart character? What circumstances allowed this composer to, as Jacques Barzun admitted, make music "convey truths"? Was it this thing we call genius? Could a word like "genius" possibly be more vague?

Wolfgang had completed work on his first symphony at the age of 8. He was then to go on to borrow the complex expressive tricks of Johann Sebastian Bach, Karl Phillip Emanuel Bach, and Haydn (all Enlightened composers "borrowed"). Later he was to develop his own musical style that was impossible to immitate. Even Beethoven could not immitate his spirit. We might wonder what was it in the character of this man to acheive such feats; or, in listening to some particular work of Mozart's, wonder what it is about him personally that harbors such creativity.

From what history of his character we have left, a connection between the man and his music is just not concrete. A profound truth is that great masters were ultimately normal persons with extreme musical gifts. In many ways, these people both enjoyed the benefits of their talents, but at the same time, they beared the burdens of their gift.

Noone exemplified this burden more than Mozart. As a child, his father dragged him all over central Europe to play in courts and in public. This history of Mozart's early life reads like a city-by-city rock tour. Only after falling seriously ill did his his father let up. And this can only be an indicator of the wip-cracking that went on in the practice room at home. At the end of his life, the unpredictable music scene in Vienna led him into poverty. At an untimely early death, there wasn't enough money to pay for a proper burial, and at this stage in European history, this meant Mozart was buried in a mass grave.

In this light, Mozart appears to epitomize the tragic starving artist. But the tragedy of the life of this man is ammended as the beauty of his music is now enjoyed the world over.

Mozart's gifts are now known to somewhat better detail. The word "genius" probably had a different connotation for Mozart's contemporaries than it does for us. We normally associate the word "genious" with personalities like Einstein. In Mozart's time, the word had more to do with art than science and math. The composer Antonio Salieri, who worked with late Mozart, referred to his "God-like gifts." To translate these gifts into our modern tongue I should say that we know that Mozart had perfect pitch even as a toddler. This means he could associate the pitch of a sound to its musical letter. For example, Mozart would hear a bell sound in a tower and know immediately whether it was a C, or perhaps a B flat. In addition to this gift, we know Mozart also had a photographic memory. He would write out music in ink with no corrections or deletions. He would not only do this in quiet, candle-lit rooms, but he could do it easily, even while carrying on conversation. (The Movie Good Will Hunting investigates the life a person with a photographic memory. I like to refer to this movie since I can't think of any other literature which goes into this phenomenon so succinctly.) He also had another gift for which there is no common word. It's the ability to "hear" what music would sound like without ever hearing it. For lack of a word, I will call it a "harmonic memory" (being the aural equivalent of a photographic memory). Though Mozart had this, its also obvious that Beethoven really had it also. Beethoven was completely deaf when he began writing his 9th Symphony. Mozart would hear music in his mind, and then know what notes produced what he was thinking.