Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered the world in a cramped apartment on Getreidegasse, the seventh child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart, only two of whom survived infancy. By age five he was composing; by six he was touring Europe's courts as a prodigy. His father, a violinist and ambitious pedagogue, recognized the gift early and built a career around exhibiting it.
The house where Mozart was born still stands in Salzburg's old town, now a museum crowded with tourists photographing the cramped rooms where a musical revolution began almost by accident. Leopold Mozart kept meticulous notebooks tracking his son's development, noting the boy could pick out chords on the harpsichord before he could reliably tie his shoes.
By the time Wolfgang was six, Leopold had turned the family into a touring act, dragging Wolfgang and his older sister Nannerl, herself a formidable keyboardist, across the courts of Munich, Vienna, and Paris. The strain of constant travel and performance took a toll on the children's health, and some historians believe the punishing schedule contributed to Wolfgang's own early death at 35.
What makes January 27, 1756 remarkable in retrospect is how unremarkable it seemed at the time. A minor court musician's son was born in a provincial Austrian city, one birth among thousands recorded that week across Europe. Yet within this ordinary entry in a church register lay the future composer of Don Giovanni, the Requiem, and over 600 other works that would reshape Western music.