Making A Bit Much of Mozart

 EVERY TOWN in the U.S. with more than ten people has more that ten million acoustic guitar singer song writers, if not more.  They ply their trade of four tracks recording systems, gig around a bit at parties and local bars, and hope for the best. The best is usually a few bucks in the bank a all the beer you can swill while you strum. Most if not all of them are very good musicians.  Problem is, we are a culture of performing artists as much as a culture of performing artist consumers; supply overwhelms demand, and few make it big, commercially. Really, this is a good thing. A country of abundant culture, flooded with homemade books nobody reads, songs nobody hears, are nobody sees.Art for the sake of art itself. Anyone seeking fame and fortune through creativity is in the wrong business with the wrong attitude.the art is the ting, all the rest but icing on the proverbial cake. In Mozart's time it was much the same, with many good but unheralded musicians and composers competing for the public's limited attention span. The streets of Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, and Paris were flooded with good poets and composers. Sometimes Mozart was in, sometimes out, depending on his most recent work, and the mood of the city.He loved Prague, which always loved hi, no matter what. Vienna, not so much. Mozart the party animal, short on cash, long on women, with an inflated sense of his own talent and importance not always matched by his audiences. Nobody knows why or for whom he wrote his final three symphonies, his finest. Ne never got paid for them. He had a weird, complicated, co-dependent relationship with his father, who began parading him around Europe when he turned six, showing off his prodigal virtuosity on the piano and viola. He could play anything standing on his head, blindfolded. In young adulthood he wrote home expressing joy at the progress of his compositions, the scenery, and his abundant social life. his father wrote back asking when and how he planned to make some money to send home. sounds like an acoustic guitar song writer sitting in his parent's basement. People today make much too much ado about Mozart. We lavish praise upon his brilliance while ignoring dozens of other composers with roughly the same level of talent and quality of opus. Millions of guitar playing singer song writers can relate.