Today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose grave we visited in Vienna (though due to the burial practices at the time, we can’t be sure his bones rest beneath that soil) and whose melodies have been in my head since I was a kid (of that I am sure).

When I was in high school, I played his sonatas on the piano and his 40th Symphony on the string bass (along with the Central Kentucky Youth Symphony Orchestra, of which I was surely the proudest and least musical member). The 40th opens with the tune that children still learn to sing with the phrase “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Mozart.” (For an interesting rendition, click here.)

I listen to Mozart now and I feel as Salieri did in the film “Amadeus,” amazed at the sounds one mortal can produce, in awe of the genius so evident in his music. “Displace one note and there would be diminishment,” Salieri says, “displace one phrase and the structure would fall. … Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those ridiculous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”