www.iht.com Every year, more than half a million people fight their way through small streets to visit Mozart's birthplace on the third floor of a medieval town house in the Getreidegasse. It is the place to go, even if you are really here only for the "Sound of Music" tour.

If you go up the narrow stairs, past the factitious "Mozart kitchen," into the room displaying photographs of autograph scores and early printed editions, you can see a few sentimental relics, like Mozart's child-sized violin and a supposed lock of his hair. You can hear Mozart facts and Mozart fiction, inextricably intertwined, retailed by guides in a cacophony of languages.

There are embroidered stories of little Wolfgang's youthful prowess in composition, absurd guesses about which corner of the room he was born in, and trinkets: his tobacco case, a wallet, buttons from one of his jackets. There are a couple of artworks that speak across the centuries, like the unfinished portrait of him at the piano by Joseph Lange, which, more than any other depiction, allows us to approach the darker side of this intense personality. Unfortunately, they are placed alongside fairly gruesome reproductions of other family portraits.

Increasingly, what remain are copies, photocopies, prints and facsimiles, as if it didn't matter because no one could tell the difference.

His birthplace is one metaphor for the tumult and contradictions that surround Mozart as the 250th anniversary of his birth approaches in January: the noise of jarring claims and counterclaims, the grinding of biographical axes, the combination of genuine admiration and exploitation and, above all, the confusion of demonstrable fact, tentative hypothesis, meaningful myth and ludicrous fiction. For Mozart is now big business, as the city of Salzburg - which consistently expects to make more than half of its multimillion-dollar tourist income from the Mozart industry - is the first to acknowledge.

The paradox is that for a long time, Salzburg erased Mozart from its history. Although a statue was erected in 1842, it was not until 1880, nearly a century after his death, that a birthplace museum was created. The Mozarteum, a foundation dedicated to the composer's legacy, bought the property in 1917, and the exhibitions there have expanded, especially since the 200th anniversary of his birth, in 1956.

Recently the Mozart industry took a bigger leap of faith in his staying power. When you buy your Mozart mug, postcards or candles from the birthplace shop, you are helping to pay for the rebuilding of a remarkable "new" Mozart house.

The Mozart Wohnhaus, or home, where the family lived after 1773, was across the river from the birthplace, in the Makartplatz. The Mozarteum had begun to turn it into a museum in the 1930s, but it was bombed in 1944, and an office building was eventually constructed on the site. The Mozarteum went into debt to raise the millions of dollars needed to buy the block, level the office building and reconstruct the house.

So now there is a bright new Mozart relic here, with an audio-visual museum and an ultrasecure storage space for manuscripts and much else, aiming to attract visitors across the river from the old town. It is a risk, for Mozart has by no means always been the world's most popular composer. Right now it just seems that way.

The Mostly Mozart Festival, which opened its 39th season  at Lincoln Center in New York City, continues to fill halls, as does its more recent relation at the Barbican Center in London. At a time when CD sales are declining, Mozart is still successful on disc, and on the Web. A huge quasi-scientific industry has been built on the dubious association of Mozart, and classical music generally, with children's mental development