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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a pop culture celebrity long before there was pop culture. Like Michael Jackson long afterwards, Mozart was the consummate child star. He burned brightly and died young, at the age of only 35.

Mozart’s childhood was stolen from him by an exacting father who served as his manager and booked Mozart on exhausting performance tours spanning all of 18th century Europe’s greatest cities and courts, starting when the Austrian prodigy was only six years old.

At the age of four, Mozart wrote his first piano sonata. By 12, Mozart composed the first of his 22 operas. Music came effortlessly to Mozart. He could compose at any time, in any mood. The midwife who attended the birth of his first child even complained that Mozart was busily composing music all the while his wife was in labor! In all, Mozart composed over 600 pieces of music over the course of his brief lifetime, including 41 symphonies and 25 concertos. Nearly all of Mozart’s musical canon remains popular, widely listened to and played today.

Like so many of today’s pop music stars whose careers were launched while they still kids, Mozart’s personality was a blend of opposites. He was masterful and commandeering when it came to all things musical, but silly and childlike when it came to just about everything else. He was fond of bathroom humor and juvenile pranks. Like many creative people, Mozart was also very superstitious. Shortly before his death from kidney failure, he was approached to write a funeral mass. For the first time in Mozart’s life, he struggled with composition, convinced that the Requiem he was working on would be played at his own funeral. Perhaps it was because Mozart died while working on the piece.

Mozart was wildly impractical when it came to financial matters. Though he made a huge fortune during his own lifetime, by the time he in 1791, he was completely impoverished and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Today, though, the Austrian National Tourist Office estimates that the Mozart brand is worth well over 6.5 billion.