Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at his home in Vienna on the 5th of December 1791, at 12:55 in the morning. He was thirty-five years old. His son Karl, who was seven at the time, later wrote that in the days before the end, Mozart's body had swollen so completely that he could not make the smallest movement. The stench, Karl recalled, reflected an internal disintegration so severe that an autopsy was ruled impossible. That detail alone captures why Mozart's death has never been fully resolved. Was he the victim of a sudden epidemic sweeping Vienna, or of his own doctors, or of something stranger? Did he spend his final months in terror and decline, or was he mostly in good spirits until a swift illness struck? And why, in the hours before he died, was he quietly singing along to his own unfinished Requiem?

• 2. The Final Weeks

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  In August 1791, Mozart arrived in Prague to oversee the premiere of his opera La clemenza di Tito. The biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek, drawing on memories shared by Constanze Mozart, wrote that Mozart appeared "pale" there, his expression "sad", though his good humor still surfaced in jokes with friends. Back in Vienna by mid-September, his condition began to worsen.

  He kept working. He completed his Clarinet Concerto and conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute on the 30th of September. He pressed on with his Requiem. But during a carriage ride in the Prater with Constanze, he told her he was writing the Requiem for himself. Tears came to his eyes as he said, "I feel definitely that I will not last much longer; I am sure I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea."

  Constanze persuaded him to set the Requiem aside and instead finish the Kleine Freimaurer-Kantate, a cantata composed for the opening of a new Masonic temple. The strategy worked briefly. The cantata premiered on the 18th of November, and Mozart told Constanze he felt "elated." He reportedly even laughed at his own fear: "Yes I see I was ill to have had such an absurd idea of having taken poison, give me back the Requiem and I will go on with it."

  Two days later, on the 20th of November, he took to his bed. The swelling, pain, and vomiting had returned, and from that point scholars agree he was gravely ill. He died two weeks later.

• 3. Questioning the Decline Narrative

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  Cliff Eisen, who supervised the 2007 reissue of Hermann Abert's major Mozart biography, took sharp issue with the picture of Mozart as a man in steady physical and psychological decline throughout his last months. In footnotes added to that edition, Eisen wrote that the evidence Abert relied upon was "selective" and served "the intended trajectory of his biography." He noted that the testimony, apart from Mozart's own letters, was entirely posthumous and driven by what he called "complicated motives both personal and financial."

  Eisen made the point plainly in the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia: the decline-and-despair story is hard to square with the "high spirits" found in Mozart's letters from most of November. Constanze's earliest account, published in Niemetschek's 1798 biography, says Mozart approached the Requiem with genuine interest in the genre, with no hint that the work weighed on him.

  The historian Ruth Halliwell added a specific reason to doubt Constanze and her sister Sophie Weber as neutral sources. Constanze had strong incentives to present her late husband's story in sentimental and dramatic terms: she organized benefit concerts from which she drew income after Mozart's death, and she successfully petitioned the Emperor for a widow's pension as early as the 11th of December 1791. The musicologist Christoph Wolff, writing in 2012, made the same argument about the music itself, challenging readings of the 1791 compositions as evidence of an "autumnal" late-life despair.

• 4. What Killed Him

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  The official record offers little certainty. The entry in the parish register says Mozart died of "severe miliary fever," a term referring to the appearance of millet-sized bumps on the skin. The historian William Stafford described the documentary foundation for any diagnosis as an inverted pyramid: a small body of primary evidence supporting a large and often reckless secondary literature, with later writers inventing symptoms "nowhere recorded in the primary sources."

  Mozart had suffered a remarkable range of illnesses across his life, including smallpox, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and rheumatism. Whether any of these contributed to his death is unknown.

  The most empirically grounded hypothesis traces his death to a minor epidemic then moving through Vienna. Writing in 1824, a physician named Guldener, who had been in contact with Mozart's doctors Sallaba and Closset at the time, recalled that a rheumatic and inflammatory fever was "fairly general" in late 1791 and that it had the same fatal course in several Viennese patients. His letter was published alongside a report by the journalist Giuseppe Carpani. A later epidemiological study examined all deaths in Vienna in the weeks surrounding Mozart's death, with comparison years of 1790 and 1792. Deaths from edema, Mozart's principal symptom, were markedly higher among younger men in those weeks. The researchers concluded that the evidence pointed to a streptococcal infection leading to acute nephritic syndrome, a kidney complication known in 18th-century Austria as "Wassersucht."

  Other researchers have proposed very different answers. A 1994 article in the journal Neurology argued for a chronic subdural hematoma, supported by examination of a skull believed to be Mozart's and by documented falls in 1789 and 1790. The authors also noted that aggressive bloodletting on the night of the 4th of December may have hastened his death. A 2000 paper by physicians Faith T. Fitzgerald and Philip A. Mackowiak, working with musicologist Neal Zaslaw, tentatively favored rheumatic fever. Separate studies have proposed trichinosis, vitamin D deficiency, and poisoning by antimony in patent medicines Mozart was known to favor.

• 5. The Salieri Rumor

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  Antonio Salieri, Mozart's colleague and rival, was accused not long after the composer's death of having poisoned him. The accusation was unfounded. The symptoms of Mozart's illness were inconsistent with poisoning, and Guldener's letter explicitly called the charge a "horrible calumny." Salieri himself denied it.

  The denial did not protect him. The widespread public belief that he had played some role in Mozart's death contributed to nervous breakdowns in his later life. The rumor's persistence says more about the appetite for a dramatic narrative than about what the historical record supports.

• 6. The Funeral and Its Myths

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  Mozart's funeral arrangements were handled by his friend and patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten. He was buried on the 7th of December at the St. Marx Cemetery outside Vienna. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes it as a "common grave," which is a term for a citizen's burial rather than an aristocratic one. It was an individual grave. After ten years, under Viennese custom, the city had the right to reuse the plot; the graves of aristocrats were exempt from this practice.

  The popular story of a pauper's burial is not supported by evidence. Mozart himself reportedly disdained elaborate funeral rites as "superstitious," which offers another explanation for the simplicity of the arrangements.

  A vivid account of the funeral, attributed to a landlord named Joseph Deiner, appeared in the Vienna Morgen-Post of the 28th of January 1856. It described a dark and stormy night, rain and snow falling together, and only a handful of mourners turning back at the Stuben Gate before the coffin even reached the cemetery. The story was widely adopted by later biographers.

  But the weather records contradict it. The diarist Karl Zinzendorf noted "mild weather and frequent mist" on the 6th of December. The Vienna Observatory recorded temperatures between 37.9 and 38.8 degrees Fahrenheit, with a weak east wind. Otto Jahn, writing in 1856, named those present: Salieri, the composer's pupil Süssmayr, van Swieten, and two other musicians.

• 7. The Final Hours

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  On the afternoon before Mozart died, his close friend Benedikt Schack was present for what became the last rehearsal of the Requiem. Schack, who had originally sung the role of Tamino in The Magic Flute, sang the soprano line while Mozart sang alto, his brother-in-law Hofer took tenor, and a bass singer named Gerl handled the bass. An obituary for Schack published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on the 25th of July 1827 described what happened: they had reached the first bars of the Lacrimosa when Mozart began to weep. He set the score aside. Eleven hours later, he was dead.

  A separate account, recorded much later and preserved in the biography by Niemetschek, has Mozart asking for the score to be brought to his bedside and saying, "Did I not say before, that I was writing this Requiem for myself?"

  An 1840 letter from the composer Ignaz von Seyfried claims that on his last night, Mozart's thoughts drifted to The Magic Flute, then still running in Vienna. He reportedly whispered to Constanze about her sister Josepha Hofer, the coloratura soprano who had created the role of the Queen of the Night: "Quiet, quiet! Hofer is just taking her top F; now my sister-in-law is singing her second aria, 'Der Holle Rache'; how strongly she strikes and holds the B-flat: 'Hort! hort! hort! der Mutter Schwur.'"

  Constanze later told Mozart's second biographer Nissen that near the very end, Mozart asked what Dr. Closset had said. When she answered with a reassuring lie, he replied, "It isn't true," and said he was distressed that he would die now, when he had finally reached a point where he could provide for her and their children. What followed, in Constanze's account, was sudden and final.

• 8. What Came After

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  Constanze moved quickly after her husband's death. On the 11th of December 1791, just six days after Mozart died, she appealed to the Emperor for a widow's pension, citing Mozart's service as a part-time chamber composer. The petition succeeded. She also organized concerts of Mozart's music and arranged for the publication of many of his works, building financial security for herself and her two young children over the years that followed.

  Biographies began appearing almost immediately. Friedrich Schlichtegroll wrote an early account based on information from Mozart's sister Nannerl. Franz Niemetschek worked with Constanze directly. Still later, Constanze assisted her second husband, Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, on a more detailed biography published in 1826.

  Mozart's musical reputation grew rapidly after his death. The biographer Maynard Solomon described an "unprecedented wave of enthusiasm" for his work in the years that followed, with publishers issuing editions of his compositions. What may have been Mozart's skull was exhumed in 1801, and between 1989 and 1991 it was examined by several scientists attempting to confirm its identity. The Requiem that Mozart never finished remains one of the most scrutinized manuscripts in music history, with Süssmayr's handwriting visible in the original score alongside Mozart's own.