Tomorrow, January 27th, marks the birthday of the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although his music is more than 200 years old, it’s still lively and relatable. That’s no small feat. We complain that different generations of rock music are hard to hear. We say that certain music is for old fogeys or for kids who just don’t get it, and that music might be a few years old, not two centuries old!

Mozart’s life and death also causes many of us to think about the nature of genius. We often hear the phrase tortured genius, a person who might even use drugs and alcohol to balance his or her tremendous talent with his or her equally tremendous pain.

But do tortured geniuses really exist? If so, was Mozart one of them? Amadeus, a stage play and movie about Mozart, depicted Mozart as a fun-loving guy, not someone staggering under the weight of heavy personal demons.

Okay, maybe it means that I shouldn’t get all my biographical information from Hollywood movies. But I can’t imagine that Amadeus invented everything from thin air.

I don’t think that pain and suffering necessarily afflict geniuses more than us average folk. Great talent or genius doesn’t automatically cause pain. I think it’s more a matter of fame.

Some of these talented people or geniuses are well-known. We know about their pain, but frankly, a lot of average people suffer from problems, they’re just not famous sufferers with famous problems.

Geniuses do struggle with substance use disorder, but so do nongeniuses. Geniuses go to rehab, but so do others. Maybe one of the greatest talents of these geniuses is that they might serve as examples. Other people might notice that if the geniuses have problems, maybe they have them too. If the geniuses seek treatment and recover successfully, maybe they can too.