Poor Little Wolfgang

It wasn’t easy being Wolfgang Mozart. He was just a toddler when the Gods snickered and fastened a dead albatross around his itty-bitty neck. There was a label fluttering from the bird’s foot. Prodigy, it said. From that moment on Wolfgang lived in the crosshairs. Every smartass ambulance chaser in town went on full alert, eager to pounce on the first pimple that heralded the erstwhile Infant Phenomenon’s topple from his pedestal. Wolfgang fooled them all by earning himself a permanent seat on musical Olympus, right up there in the top row with biggest of the big guys. Cultural immortality comes at a price, however: Wolfgang would have to put up with an eternity of smartass ambulance chasers, such as the twitty musicologists who pored over his early opera La Finta Semplice and concluded that the young Mozart was woefully inadequate to the challenge of depicting adult emotions. You can just hear his exasperated sputter emanating from the Great Beyond: oh for Pete’s sake, guys, give it a rest! I was only twelve, dammit.