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Syphilis or Salieri: Mozart’s Killer

THAT MOZART WAS a musical genius is probably beyond question. A child prodigy, he could write music before he could write his own name, with half of all his symphonies created between the ages of eight and nineteen. He was also something of a raving pervert with a scatological obsession bordering on the pathological; the contents of letters exchanged with his similarly inclined mother simply cannot be referenced or quoted here. Let’s just say that the same mind that conjured forth ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ (A Little Night Music) also spawned his less-publicized ‘Leck mich im Arsch’ (Lick Me in the Arse), a canon in B-flat major, Mozart catalogue number K231. He also wrote a sequel to said ditty with a title best not here revealed. But was he killed by his allegedly envious rival, Antonio Salieri? This is a popular theory presented as fact in the highly acclaimed and much-awarded Amadeus (1984), the film from which present generations have gleaned their perception of the whole Mozart–Salieri saga.

In that film and in accordance with the popular perception of Mozart and Salieri, the former is played by a youthful Tom Hulce and the latter by the older F. Murray Abraham, who gives a performance as the older burnout with the cocky young genius snapping at his heels. In reality they were of similar age – Mozart was born 1756 and Salieri in 1750 – with the latter at the time of their meeting in Vienna secure in his position as Kapellmeister of the city and very much at the top of his game. The only musical rivalry in the city was a very broad-fronted one between the German faction and the Italian; there is no evidence of acute points of personal animosity and certainly none between Mozart and Salieri, each the leading light of their own respective factions.

Never in the best of physical health – Mozart had possibly already suffered the ravages of syphilis, typhoid, smallpox, bronchitis, pneumonia and three bouts of rheumatic fever – he went into a sudden and rapid decline in November 1791, aged just thirty-five. According to all eyewitnesses, his condition was marked by high fever, nausea, double incontinence and pronounced sweating, and the stench of putrefaction permeated his room. Within two weeks his entire body resembled a bloated mass, and he lapsed into a coma before dying. True, at the onset of this condition he had himself started the poisoning rumour by rambling on to his wife, Constanze, that someone from the Italian faction must have slipped him a dose of Aqua Tofana, a colourless, tasteless yet quite lethal blend of arsenic, lead and belladonna that was indistinguishable from water. Supposedly invented in the early seventeenth century by one Guilia Tofana of Palermo in Italy and still accepted as a reality by many, such an insidious poison was pure fiction. The preeminent A. C. Grayling, Master of the New College of Humanities in London, addressed the subject in his The Heart of Things (2006), asserting Aqua Tofana to have been an urban myth used to frighten and titillate courts across Europe. Had such a poison existed and been given to Mozart, then he would not have had a chance to say anything to anyone.

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Even sticking with standard arsenic, had a single and lethal dose been administered Mozart would have been dead within hours or, at best, a couple of days. Incremental doses were favoured by some poisoners but this required continual access to the victim. Yet the only people with Mozart throughout his well-documented decline were members of his immediate family and his physician Dr Nikolaus Closset. As the symptoms suffered by Mozart fail to match those of arsenic poisoning, some have speculated that he was just another victim of a highly aggressive streptococcal infection that was doing the rounds of the city at the time. An alternative theory, advanced in 2001 by Professor Jan Hirschmann of the School of Medicine at the University of Washington and considered likely by many, maintains the culprit to have been trichinosis, an infection contracted from eating (contaminated) pork, a meat of which Mozart was inordinately fond. Ingestion of the parasitic trichinella worm, which so often infests pork meat and can survive inadequate cooking, does indeed induce symptoms similar to those endured by Mozart. Retrospective diagnosis is hardly an exact science and more useful in the elimination of causes of death than it is in causal identification, but Hirschmann’s paper is of particular interest as it goes to great lengths to explain why neither arsenic nor any other poison of the time could possibly have been involved.

Also enshrined in popular myth is the image of a penniless Mozart being buried in a pauper’s grave during a blizzard with few in attendance. Mozart was buried in the manner prescribed for all by the burial regulations for Vienna as decreed in 1784 by the Emperor Joseph: due to a lack of space, it was decided that all – except, of course, the elite – should be buried in a grave which would be reopened every ten years so the remains could be cleared and the grave reused. His funeral was organized by Baron Gottfried van Swieten and attended by many, including Salieri and other musical notables. All the blizzard nonsense was dreamed up by a journalist called Joseph Deiner who, falsely claiming attendance, wrote an article in the Vienna Morgen-Post of 28 January 1856, telling of the pitifully small band of mourners bent against the raging blizzard, which eventually drove them from the grave. The records of the Vienna Observatory, on the other hand, notes the weather on 6 December 1791 to have been ‘mild with frequent mist; temperatures ranging from 37°F–38°F with a weak east wind throughout the day’.

THE MOZART LEGACY

Although known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer was christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, a cumbersome mouthful, which is likely the reason he was known to his wife and intimates as Wolferl.

Although he and Constanze had six children, only two survived infancy; Karl Thomas, who died in 1858, and Franz Xaver, who died in 1844, with neither of them ever marrying or fathering a child. Franz enjoyed some limited success as a composer-conductor while Karl spent most of his life in clerical jobs after going bankrupt with a piano store in Livorno. When he died, so too did the direct Mozart line.

That said, the indirect Mozart line did make it into the twentieth century with Bertha Forschter, the great-granddaughter of Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, dying in 1917, while Karoline Grau, the great-great-grandniece of Mozart’s father, Leopold, only passed away in 1965.

After the funeral, word of Mozart’s paranoid ramblings about poison leaked out to be whipped into a maelstrom of gossip around Vienna. As the unofficial head of the Italian faction, Salieri was taunted by whispers that he killed the young genius out of spite and envy. Mozart’s wife, Constanze, infuriatingly portrayed as a vacuous airhead in so many biopics, certainly placed no credence in such gossip as, a few years after her husband’s death, she sent their son Franz to Salieri for tutoring, something she would hardly do if she thought the man had murdered her husband. Multilingual and no mean soprano herself, it was Constanze who, after Mozart’s death, organized memorial concerts across Europe and became the diligent custodian of his catalogue of compositions to ensure her husband’s death would only be the beginning of his fame.

As for Salieri, the spiteful gossip branding him a murderer weighed heavy on his mind as the hushed sniggers dogged the footsteps of his career. Hospitalized with dementia in 1823, in his darker moments he could be found wandering and deranged, screaming that he was the man who killed Mozart. In 1830, Pushkin penned a melodrama called Mozart and Salieri, which unequivocally branded Salieri as the machinating murderer, with Rimsky-Korsakov transforming that play into the libretto for his 1897 opera of the same name. In 1979, Peter Shaffer used the Pushkin original as the foundation for his play Amadeus which, to bring us full circle, was made into the film from which most take their impression of the two protagonists.

But the mysteries surrounding Mozart don’t end there – what happened to his skull? One story goes that when officiating at Mozart’s burial, Joseph Rothmayr, the sexton at St Marx Cemetery, twisted a length of wire about the corpse’s neck to facilitate later identification and, when officiating at the exhumation of that same communal grave a decade later, he stole the skull as a keepsake. When he retired, Rothmayr left his gruesome trophy to his successor, Joseph Radshopf who, in 1842, passed it on to a Viennese engraver called Jakob Hyrtl. Finding the skull ‘staring’ at him across his desk a trifle unsettling, Hyrtl gave it to his brother, Joseph, the chair of anatomy at the University of Vienna, who had an interest in the now-discredited ‘science’ of phrenology and thus his own considerable collection of skulls. Having once refused to sell the skull to Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg, despite a princely offer of 200 silver thalers, Hyrtl’s family donated it to the International Mozarteum Foundation in that city. But the mystery was not yet over.

In 2006 the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, known domestically as ORF, hired a team of geneticists to determine whether the skull held by the Mozarteum was indeed that of the long-dead composer. Taking DNA material from the remains of his niece, Jeanette, and his maternal grandmother, Eva Rosine Pertl, exhumed at Salzburg’s St Sebastian Cemetery, comparison tests were run against material extracted from teeth in the skull. But, to everyone’s astonishment, no genetic link could be established between any two of the three samples. If the rest of Mozart’s kin were as promiscuous as he was, then rampant illegitimacy throughout such a family would come as no surprise; either that, or the skull held by the Mozarteum is not that of the composer. In the musical circles of both Vienna and Salzburg there is a wry maxim stating that there may be a dozen Mozart skulls in existence, but only three of them are genuine.

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