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 g ...