Welp, here we are again, dear reader, another Tuesday spinning around the sun on this mud-ball of consequence and cheap wine, and the calendar, that merciless tick-tocking ledger of our own slow decay, informs us that it is January 27th.  A day that would, if I were in charge of things, be a global holiday of mandatory, state-sponsored debauchery.  Why? Because on this day, back in 1756, the heavens smiled (maybe smirked) down at humanity, and out popped – fully formed, one assumes, with a tiny powdered wig and a head full of symphonies that would make angels weep into their celestial cognacs – one Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.  [Preemptive response to any snarky freshman insisting Mozart’s middle name was Amadeus…you’re not wrong: it’s in there.  “Theophilus” translates to “lover of God” or “beloved of God,” which he often rendered as “Amadeus” in Latin.  Now quit whining and pay attention.]

Wolfie.  The Kid from Salzburg, that smug little Archbishopric town, a baroque snow-globe of a city that probably didn’t deserve the cosmic anomaly it was hosting.  This was the starting block of a thirty-five-year rampage of such concentrated, supernova-grade talent that it still scorches the ears and baffles the mind.  Almost instantly beyond merely composing music, he mainlined the divine, scribbling down dispatches from a dimension the rest of us can only glimpse in our most profound moments of chemical or emotional excess.  He committed a kind of ecstatic arson on the very idea of what music was supposed to be, torching the rulebook while humming counterpoint so perfect it bishops shit and aristocrats rethink their live choices.  Dude was basically a human high-pressure hose of melody, spraying the 18th century with a recursive, self-referential brilliance that, frankly, most dear readers are too intellectually malnourished to even process.  He spat out concertos like sunflower seeds.  He tossed off operas that contained more human truth in a single aria than most novels manage in 400 pages of tortured prose.  All this while navigating the powdered, perfumed, and profoundly perilous viper pit of Viennese court society.  It’s been 270 years of the little bastards ghost still owning the room, still making every  subsequent composer sound like they’re trying to hot-wire a harpsichord in the back of a stolen carriage while Mozart’s already three towns ahead, laughing in perfect sonata form.  You listen to the Jupiter Symphony or the Requiem and you realize the rest of us are just dicking around with tuning forks while he was out there rewriting the laws of emotional physics.

And then, the flameout.  The big, ugly stop.  Thirty-five.  An age when most of us are just starting to figure out how to properly file our taxes, Mozart was already a legend being shoveled into a pauper’s grave.  The official story is as thin as cheap soup, some horseshit about a fever.  But we know better, don’t we, dear reader?  The darkness that always nibbled at the edges of his brightest compositions finally came to collect.

Was it Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, finally succumbing to a fit of murderous envy?  A plausible, almost operatic, narrative.  Or was it something more sordid, more human?  A bad plate of pork, a dose of trichinosis turning his guts into a warzone?  A grimly ironic end for a man who lived his life at forte fortissimo. Or maybe it was mercury, the fashionable cure-all of the day, a slow-acting poison administered by a jealous husband or a quack doctor.  Regardless, we know it was no grand operatic exit, no dramatic farewell aria – just a genius reduced to a shivering, swollen husk in a rented room while the city outside kept right on waltzing without him.

But here we are, centuries later, still blasting his stuff in concert halls and headphones and car stereos at 3 a.m. when the world feels too stupid to live in.  The music doesn’t age, doesn’t date, doesn’t give a flying fuck about your theories or your playlists or your fragile ego; it just sits there, eternal and smug, daring you to keep up.

So today, raise a toast to the Wolf…not of some polite Riesling, but of something with a kick: whiskey, cheap red, black coffee laced with spite.  Happy birthday, Wolfie.  He burned twice as bright, and if he only lasted half as long, well, maybe that was the point.  He crammed a hundred lifetimes of pure, uncut genius into three and a half decades, leaving behind a body of work so perfect, so impossible, that it serves as a permanent middle finger to the quiet desperation of an ordinary life.  (And if you’re reading this while some string quartet is sawing through Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the background, crank it louder.  Let the uncultured heathens next door know the dead genius is still winning).

N.P.: “Mozart” – Trans Siberian Orchestra