This deep dive strips away the Hollywood myth around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, drawing on roughly 1,500 pages of translated family letters, government records, and early biographies. It follows him from a Salzburg childhood spent touring Europe under his father Leopold, through a disastrous job hunt in Paris where his mother died, to the literal kick out the door that ended his service to Archbishop Colloredo and launched his life as a freelance musician in Vienna.

The conversation examines how Mozart pioneered subscription concerts in rented rooms and ballrooms, spent lavishly on a custom fortepiano and a billiard table, and then watched his income fall by roughly two-thirds when the Austro-Turkish war drained aristocratic patronage. It also unpacks his innovations in counterpoint and chromatic harmony, Haydn’s declaration that he was the greatest composer he knew, the begging letters to Michael von Puchberg, and why the unmarked common grave was standard Viennese custom rather than a pauper’s burial.

• How Leopold turned the family into a touring enterprise, with patrons who paid in snuff boxes and a smallpox outbreak that nearly killed both children
• Why the Sistine Chapel memory feat reflects structural understanding of harmony rather than rote memorization
• The scatological Bäsle letters as a pressure release valve for a young man facing adult crises
• Writing the final three symphonies, including the Jupiter, in the summer of 1788 while depressed and in debt
• A February 2026 discovery of a 44-page flute and harp manuscript in a French library, proof the story is still unfolding