What if Mozart...?

The cause Mozart´s death cannot be known with certainty. What it is much certain is that money was a constant source of anxiety for the great composer.

Although he had periods of economic stability or even prosperity when the aristocrats filled him up, his financial situation was critical in many moments of his life, which is certainly ironic given the fact that he showed his prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg and composed over 600 works of all genres during his 35 years.

Mozart was not the only composer who suffered such a situation, which also happened to Bach or Haydn. They did not have complete creative freedom and depended on the orders of Princes and benefactors who financed their compositions.

Considered strictly from an economic point of view, probably Mozart would rather be a writer in the England of the early eighteenth century. I say this because it was Queen Anne who gave name to the Statute enacted in England in 1710, which is commonly accepted as the birth of copyright.

Until that moment publishers had the privilege to exploit literary works by printing them. The truth is that until the appearance of the brilliant invention by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century, there had not raised issues of intellectual property because the reproduction of books was slow and expensive.

The Statute of Anne ended with these privileges which had led to monopolies and acknowledged author is the owner of the work and is entitled to authorize the reproduction of his work and to choose the publisher. For the first time, copyright vested in authors rather than publishers. 

Three centuries later, copyright is again a hot topic but debate now is about whether current regulations are adequate to face the challenges of the Internet and the digital era or they should be reviewed from top to bottom.