POOR Mozart. Everybody who saw the movie knows genius went unrewarded, that the composer of «Don Giovanni» and «The Magic Flute» lived hand to mouth and died a pauper. In a paper written for the Mozart Bicentennial Symposium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, the husband-wife team calculates that Mozart’s income in the last decade of his life was thoroughly middle class by ‘s standards — a remarkable achievement for a time in which most wage earners lived at the raw edge of subsistence. Mozart, moreover, was not alone in his good fortune. His was a golden era for composers in German-speaking Europethe Baumols say, one in which a serendipitous convergence of factors favored the flowering of musical culture. They believe that the fragmentation of central European states along with changes in the technology of music virtually assured that economic growth would generate financial windfalls for composers. First, the qu...