Mozart wasn’t poor; he just wasn’t much of a money manager. That is the suggestion of scholars who scoured Austrian archives for an exhibition that opened yesterday at the Musikverein in Vienna, The Associated Press reported. At a time when successful professionals were living comfortably on 450 florins a year, Mozart was earning about 10,000 florins — at least $42,000 in today’s terms, a sum that would have put him in the top 5 percent of wage earners in late-18th-century Vienna. “Mozart made a lot of money,” said Otto Biba, director of the Archive of the Friends of Music in Vienna. For centuries, nevertheless, Mozart has been portrayed as poor, and letters on display at the exhibition, devoted to his later years in Vienna, show that he repeatedly borrowed money from friends to pay for travel and social obligations; whatever wealth he had was long gone by the time he died at 35 in 1791. Although unable to buttress their suspicions, some experts believe that gambling debts bit heavily into his income, much of it, Mr. Biba said, derived from teaching piano to aristocrats.