The death of Mozart, 1791

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on 5^th December 1791, two months short of his 35^th birthday. The output of brilliant music throughout his life had been phenomenal, and he died with one of his greatest works, his “Requiem”, still unfinished. The work we have today was completed, based on Mozart’s notes, by one of his pupils, Franz Süssmayr.

Cause of death

Mozart had started feeling ill earlier in the year and had gone through phases of illness followed by partial recovery. He suspected that he would not survive and made remarks to the effect that the Requiem was being written as much for himself as for his anonymous commissioner.

He also hinted that he might have been poisoned, and the finger of suspicion was pointed at a fellow composer, Antonio Salieri, with whom Mozart had not always been on the best terms. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim and it seems highly unlikely as a cause of death.

If Mozart had been poisoned it could have been at his own hand, through self-medication using over-strong preparations that included antimony.

However, there have been many speculations as to the cause of Mozart’s death, one of the stronger possibilities, due to consistencies with the symptoms, being that he was suffering from a subdural haematoma, or a bleed on the brain. The practice of bloodletting, which was a common treatment at the time for many illnesses, may also have been a contributory factor.

A “pauper’s grave”

Another myth surrounding Mozart’s death was that he was buried in a common pauper’s grave and thus not given the recognition that was his due. This claim needs to be put into its proper context.

There were two methods of burial available in Vienna at the time, the “common” method being that which applied to everyone who was not an aristocrat. It did not involve the body being tipped into a mass grave, as might be assumed, but it did mean that a body could be removed from a grave after ten years to make room for a new one. As it happened, Mozart’s skull was exhumed in 1801, ten years after its burial, and there have been conflicting claims over whether it still exists.

Whatever the cause of Mozart’s death, it clearly happened at far too young an age. The world was almost certainly denied a wealth of great music that one of its greatest ever composers never got to write.

© John Welford