Divine idiot or journeyman tunesmith? In this book on the life and work of Mozart, the author shows that Mozart was neither of these popular fictions, but an artist of his era whose work was clearly informed by the ideas and discoveries of the Enlightenment. This book examines the traumatic emergence of a modern society in 18th century Austria, drawing on writers and thinkers such as Richardson, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Schiller and Blake to offer a radical reappraisal of the history and meaning of the Enlightenment, and of Mozart's role within it. The Vienna of the 1780s, under the revolutionary Emperor Joseph II, where Mozart lived for ten years until his death in 1791, is evoked, a world in which coffee houses, literary salons and Masonic lodges created a forum for intense intellectual argument, political debate and religious enquiry.