Ask the internet and Mozart had synesthesia, with D major orange and B-flat minor blackish. Ask the archive and silence answers. No letter, no contemporary account, no report from a family famous for documenting its prodigy describes Mozart experiencing keys or sounds as colors. The specific key-color pairings that circulate trace to later writers, not to Mozart or anyone who knew him.
The confusion has understandable roots. Mozart possessed extraordinary pitch and an ear that catalogued everything, and absolute pitch co-occurs with synesthesia often enough that the two get blurred. Slide from “heard everything” to “heard in color” and a fact becomes a legend, then a listicle staple repeated until it needs no source.
He anchors our disputed tier as the cleanest example of how these lists rot: a plausible-sounding claim, no primary evidence, endless repetition. The historical cases that hold up, Amy Beach with her childhood color requests on record, Scriabin arguing key colors with colleagues in public, show what real documentation looks like, and Mozart has none of it.