His music added to her glory. Now, 250 years after Mozart's birth, Vienna emerges with a fresh, multicultural vigor to honor its adopted son with an unprecedented array of concerts. Manuela Hoelterhoff leads a tour that seamlessly fuses an imperial past and a dynamic present

Whenever I visit Vienna, I pause for a few seconds at my favorite street crossing in the world. On my left is the fabled opera house, whose rebuilding was a top priority after the last war left the town in ruins. On my right is the Walfischgasse, straight ahead is the pedestrian Kärtnerstrasse, with its irresistible vendors of high-heaped sandwiches and felt hats. There is little traffic. I always cross while the light is still red, a habit I fell into as a student thirty-five years ago, when the outraged faces of older locals dutifully waiting for the green filled me with pleasure. These days, the line of the dutiful is more porous, but old habits die hard.

In the past, depending on my mood, I would turn to whomever I was with and launch into a monologue about the world's most famous Austrian. No, not Mozart, whose birthday Austria is celebrating this year. His Google results only come to about twenty million. The Braunau-born Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, trumps him with twenty-three million.

Hitler adored operas like The Merry Widow but had no interest in Mozart; there's nothing loudly bombastic or excessively sentimental about Mozart's music—qualities he, like most tyrants, found central to artistic perfection. Their only connection is the mystery attending their remains. The Führer went up in fire and smoke in April 1945; Mozart was dropped into a lime pit at the St. Marx cemetery in December 1791.

Because he died in debt and lies in an unmarked grave, biographers pushed the myth of the unappreciated genius suffering in an unheated garrett. But Mozart was neither a pauper nor unloved when he died. He and his young wife, Konstanze, spent money when they had it, which was often. Today, they'd be running up huge credit card bills. It's no longer conventional to slander Konstanze as a flighty creature who failed to prize her husband. She was not yet thirty when he died, leaving her with debts but also with manuscripts that she tended with considerable diligence. And simple burials, including recycled coffins, had been mandated by the emperor himself, the frugal Joseph II, who recoiled at flashy funerals—even that of his own mother, Empress Maria Theresa, who had herself packed for posterity into an ornate tomb that has become a must-see tourist stop.

Though Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, Vienna was his town for the last decade of his short life. He married Konstanze in St. Stephan's Cathedral, occupied a succession of often spacious apartments, and had many patrons, including the emperor, though Joseph II preferred his uninspired (if not homicidal) court composer, Antonio Salieri. Mozart actually lost a playoff to Salieri in a fancy contest judged by Joseph in the Orangerie at Schönbrunn Palace. In spite of that, rumors that Salieri poisoned him fluttered through the music world for decades, inspiring a short play by Pushkin (which was set to music by Rimsky-Korsakov) and, more significantly and recently, the highly entertaining yet moving play by Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, in which Salieri is driven mad with envy and rage that such heavenly music should flow from the pen of a vulgar little man who screamed with laughter at his own scatalogical jokes.