He spent his childhood years as a combination prodigy and freak show, carted around Europe with his father and sister to dazzle the aristocracy with his ability to perform and improvise on the keyboard and violin. One result of this, surely, was the cultivation of his powers to entertain; another was his later impatience with listeners unable to grasp the scope of his achievement.

That impatience only grew during his years as an employee of the archbishop of Salzburg, a period during which he felt constrained by the limitations of his provincial hometown. After moving to Vienna in 1781, he struggled to find and keep a steady job, the victim not only of his own political shortcomings but also of the shifting economic and sociological landscape in European musical life. He died 10 years later, at 35, of a mysterious illness whose exact identity scholars are still debating (the leading contender is rheumatic fever).

It's possible to identify some concrete links between Mozart's life and the music he wrote, but they're mostly matters of style or artistic technique. The most telling, for instance, was his belated discovery of the music of Bach, which sent him into a frenzy of study and self-improvement in an effort to integrate the older composer's contrapuntal techniques into his music.