Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has become a popular name for an almost otherwordly level of genius. His musical feats as a child prodigy alone would have guaranteed his legend. However, the Austrian Mozart has never been relegated to be a place of incomprehensibility. Perhaps his greatest genius was his aility to make the most difficult music appear effortlessly written and spontaneous. He excelled in every genre of music he attempted. Mozart began composing operas at the age of ten, works that already demonstrated musical maturity and sophistication. His chidhood must have been both glamorous and dreadful as his composer father Leopold marketed the boy around the many courts of Europe in search of patronage. As he grew into adulthood, Mozart added his keen insights into human nature to his operatic compositions, and his three operas composed to the brilliant librettos of Lorenzo da Ponte remain paragons of what the genre can achieve. Legends naturally accrued around such a man, exaggerated in future generations. he did not starve to death, as some would have it. He did not have any great rivalry with the imperial court composer Salieri, whose rumored jealousy ws provided dramatic material for the playwrights from Pushkin in the early nineteenth century to Peter Schaeffer (Amadeus). Neighter did the Emperor Joseph II actually say that Mozart's opera The Abduction from the Seraglio had "too many notes," nor did the Queen of Naples ever call La clemenza di Tito garbage. Within a few years after his death, his popularity soared among the public and his legend carefully nurtured by his widow Costanze grew accordingingly.

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