Home › Famous IQs › Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Cox's 1926 figure of approximately 155 for Mozart was criticized in the literature even at the time of publication. Her methodology rewarded verbal-conceptual childhood precocity (Greek at three, calculus at nine) but had no good way to weight extraordinary musical accomplishment. Mozart's documented compositional output starts before his sixth birthday and includes performances for European courts; in modern psychometric terms his musical-domain ability was at the absolute top of the human distribution.

His mature output runs to roughly 600 works including 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 22 operas including The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, and the Requiem left unfinished at his death. He played and composed for the entire common-practice instrumentation of his era.

He toured Europe extensively as a child performer (1762-1773) and worked in Vienna from 1781 until his death at 35 from a still-debated illness. The popular legend of his pauper's burial is broadly inaccurate; he was buried in a standard middle-class grave per Viennese custom of the period.