On October 14, 1791, in his last surviving letter, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his wife, Constanze, at Baden that he had taken the Italian composer Antonio Salieri and singer Mme Cavalieri to a performance of The Magic Flute and that Salieri had been most complimentary: “from the overture to the last chorus there was not a single number that did not call forth from him a bravo! or bello!” Less than two months later, Mozart was dead. In a report from Prague written within a week of the composer’s death, the Musikalisches Wochenblatt mentioned rumors of poisoning based on the swollen condition of his body. Suspicion gradually came to focus on Salieri, who, despite his recently professed delight over The Magic Flute, had for a decade been an implacable rival of Mozart’s in Vienna. In the years prior to Salieri’s death in 1825, the rumors of his recourse to poison as a final weapon of rivalry were fed by reports that, while in failing health, he had confessed his guilt and, in remorse, had attempted suicide.
The rumors that Mozart was murdered and that Salieri was his assassin have produced controversies and traditions in the fields of medicine, musicology, history, and literature that have not lost their vigor today. In 1970 David Weiss’s novel The Assassination of Mozart appeared in bookstores, and Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979) and the film version brought the poisoning contentions to the notice of an international audience. Medical and historical debate on Mozart’s untimely demise continues both in this country and abroad, and German writers and researchers in particular show a remarkable preoccupation with the composer’s death. The writings on this fascinating subject differ widely in quality and point of view, and many of the authors seem unaware of the sources on which others have drawn. It therefore remains tempting to return to this classic historical mystery with a view to providing a “confrontation” among the various contending parties, including those who blame Mozart’s death on natural causes, poisoning, professional jealousy, Viennese politics, the Masons, and the Jews. In this centuries-long debate no possible suspect is spared. Virtually no organ of Mozart’s body is regarded as above the suspicion of having failed in its appointed function, and, with the exception of the composer’s wife, no group or individual is cleared of complicity in his death.
The story of Mozart’s last days must begin with the mysterious commissioning of the Requiem, which apparently caused his sensitive soul to brood on death. Around July of 1791, when Mozart’s work on The Magic Flute was virtually complete and rehearsals had already begun, Mozart received a visit from a tall, grave-looking stranger dressed completely in gray. The stranger presented an anonymous letter commissioning Mozart to compose a requiem as quickly as possible at any price. It is now accepted that the commission had a very prosaic explanation. The messenger’s patron was Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted a requiem composed in memory of his late wife and who intended to pass himself off as the composer. Mozart accepted the commission but put aside his work on it when he received an offer to write an opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for the coronation of Emperor Leopold in Prague. Just as Mozart and his wife were getting into the coach to leave for Prague, the gray-clad messenger appeared “like a ghost” and pulled at Constanze’s coat, asking her, “What about the Requiem?” Mozart explained his reason for the journey and promised to turn to the Requiem as soon as he came back to Vienna.
Franz Niemetschek, Mozart’s first biographer, reports that Mozart became ill in Prague and required continuous medical attention while he was there. He states that Mozart “was pale and his expression was sad, although his good humour was often shown in merry jest with his friends.”
On Mozart’s return to Vienna, he started work on the Requiem with great energy and interest, but his family and friends noted that his illness was becoming worse and that he was depressed. To cheer him up Constanze went driving with him one day in the Prater. According to her account, which she gave to Niemetschek, “Mozart began to speak of death, and declared that he was writing the Requiem for himself. Tears came to the eyes of this sensitive man. ‘I feel definitely,’ he continued, ‘that I will not last much longer; I am sure I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea.’” This conversation, which is one of the cornerstones of the poisoning legend, Constanze later repeated to her second husband, Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, who recorded it in his biography of Mozart in much the same terms as the Niemetschek version. And Constanze was still recounting the episode as late as 1829, according to the journal of Vincent and Mary Novello, who paid her a visit in Salzburg that year. In fact, the Novellos’ journal reveals that Constanze told them Mozart had clearly identified the poison that he thought had been administered to him as aqua toffana. This poison, whose principal active ingredient is supposed to have been arsenic, was introduced by a Neapolitan woman named Toffana in seventeenth-century Italy and had startling effect on the statistics of sudden death. It is perhaps regrettable that history has not seen fit to choose the most sublime of her various nicknames for the potion, the “manna of St. Nicholas di Bari.”
One of the most dependable accounts of Mozart’s terminal illness is provided by Constanze’s sister, Sophie Haibel, in a report sent in 1825 to Nissen at his request for use in his biography. Most of the symptoms with which the medical historians have dealt we owe to her account: the painful swelling of his body, which made it difficult for him to move in bed; his complaint that he had “the taste of death” on his tongue; his high fever. Despite his suffering, he continued to work on the Requiem. On the last day of the composer’s life, when Sophie came to see him, Franz Xaver Süssmayr was at his bedside and Mozart was explaining to him how he ought to finish the Requiem. (It is reported by a newspaper article contemporaneous with Sophie’s memoir that earlier on this day Mozart was singing the alto part of the Requiem with three friends who supplied falsetto, tenor, and bass.) Mozart retained his worldly concerns to the point of advising Constanze to keep his death secret until his friend Johann Georg Albrechtsberger could be informed, so that his friend could make prompt arrangements to succeed to Mozart’s recently granted rights as colleague and heir apparent of the Kapellmeister of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. When Mozart appeared to be sinking, one of his doctors, Nikolaus Closset, was sent for and was finally located at the theater. However, according to Sophie’s account, that drama lover “had to wait till the piece was over.” When he finally arrived, he ordered cold compresses put on Mozart’s feverish brow, but these “provided such a shock that he did not regain consciousness again before he died.” According to Sophie, the last thing Mozart did was imitate the kettledrums in the Requiem. She wrote that thirty-four years later she could still hear that last music of his.
Nissen, in his biography, states that Mozart’s fatal illness lasted for fifteen days, terminating with his death around midnight (probably the early morning) of December 5, 1791. The illness began with swellings of his hands and feet and an almost complete immobility, and sudden attacks of vomiting followed. Nissen describes the illness as “high miliary fever.” He writes that Mozart retained consciousness until two hours before his death.
Neither Dr. Closset nor Mozart’s other attending physician prepared a death certificate with the cause of death stated. No autopsy was performed. From the very beginning, doctors and other commentators have differed widely as to the cause of death. Nissen’s identification of the fatal illness as miliary fever accords with the cause of death as set forth in the registers of deaths of St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Parish in Vienna. Although that nomenclature does not fit any precise modern medical definition, it is surmised that the term as used in the medicine of the eighteenth century denoted a fever accompanied by a rash. However, a number of other illnesses have been put forward as the cause of death, including grippe, tuberculosis, dropsy, meningitis, rheumatic fever, heart failure, and Graves’ disease. The hypotheses of some of these diseases, such as tuberculosis, appear to have been based not so much on any of the observable medical phenomena as on a biographical conclusion that Mozart in his last years was killing himself with overwork and irregular living. The suggestion of Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroidism, is derived from facial characteristics of Joseph Lange’s unfinished 1782 portrait of the composer, which include, in the words of an imaginative medical observer, “the wide angle of the eye, the staring, rather frightened look, the swelling of the upper eyelid and the moist glaze of the eyes.” Art historian Kenneth Clark has quite a different interpretation of Mozart’s intent gaze in the Lange portrait. The painting conveys to Clark not the sign of death nine years off but “the single-mindedness of genius.”
Probably the prevailing theory of modern medical authorities who believe Mozart to have died a natural death is that he suffered from a chronic kidney disease, which passed in its final stages into a failure of kidney function, edema, and uremic poisoning. This theory was advanced as early as 1905 by a French physician, Dr. Barraud. It is argued that this diagnosis is most in keeping with the recorded phenomena of Mozart’s last sufferings, including the swelling of his body and the poisonous taste of which he complained. Modern medicine has established that certain chronic diseases of the kidneys are commonly caused by streptococcal infections suffered long before the effect on the kidney function becomes noticeable.
Medical commentators on Mozart’s death have implicated a number of childhood illnesses as likely contributors to his chronic kidney disease. They are aided in their researches by detailed descriptions of the illnesses of the Mozart children in the letters of their father, Leopold. Certainly their recurring health problems were a proper subject of parental concern, but the pains Leopold takes to describe his children’s symptoms and the course of their illnesses and recoveries stamp him as an amateur of medicine. In fact, he often administered remedies to the children, his favorites being a cathartic and an antiperspirant he refers to as “black powder” and “margrave powder,” respectively. It is fortunate that the children survived both the diseases and their father’s cures.
In 1762, when Wolfgang was six years old, he was ill with what a doctor consulted by Leopold Mozart declared to be a type of scarlet fever, an infection capable of causing kidney injury. In the following year, 1763, young Mozart contracted an illness marked by painful joints and fever, which have led some observers to postulate rheumatic fever, which could also lead to adverse effects on the kidney. When Mozart was nine he took sick with what Leopold called a “very bad cold,” and later the same year both his sister and he were more seriously ill. Nannerl was thought to be in such serious condition that the administration of extreme unction was begun. No sooner had she recovered than Wolfgang was struck by the illness, which in his father’s words reduced him in a period of four weeks to such a wretched state that “he is not only absolutely unrecognizable, but has nothing left but his tender skin and little bones.” Some modern commentators identify this severe illness as an attack of abdominal typhus. Two years later, in 1767, Wolfgang contracted smallpox, which left him quite ill and caused severe swelling of his eyes and nose. He also suffered throughout his childhood from a number of bad toothaches, which have led some supporters of the kidney disease theory to invoke the possibility of a focal infection contributing to kidney damage. The last reference to an illness prior to his final days is in a letter from Leopold to Nannerl in 1784, when her brother was twenty-eight. This letter reported that Wolfgang had become violently ill with colic in Vienna and had a doctor in almost daily attendance. Leopold added that not only his son “but a number of other people caught rheumatic fever, which became septic when not taken in hand at once.” There is no other evidence of a serious illness of Mozart’s until the period of a few months preceding his death. Dr. Louis Carp attempts to demonstrate the presence of severe symptoms of kidney disease as early as 1787 by quoting from a letter from Mozart to his father in April of that year: “I never lie down at night without reflecting that—young as I am—I may not live to see another day.” This letter, written to console Mozart’s dying father, gives us an important insight into the composer’s speculations about mortality. However, it does not provide any clue to his physical condition or to his feelings about his health.
Locked in combat with the medical authorities attributing Mozart’s death to disease is a substantial body of modern physicians who would support Mozart’s own suspicion by declaring that he was indeed poisoned. These doctors, including Dieter Kerner and Gunther Duda of Germany, believe that the poison administered was mercury, which attacks the kidneys and produces much the same diagnostic picture as that presented by the final stages of a natural kidney failure. Both Kerner and Duda minimize much of the evidence that has been cited in support of the theory that Mozart suffered from a chronic kidney disease stemming from streptococcal infection. Dr. Duda believes that the severity and nature of Mozart’s childhood illnesses have been misstated. He is convinced that the so-called scarlet fever identified as such by the physician whom Mozart’s father consulted was, in fact, erythema nodosum, a disorder of uncertain origin resulting in raised eruptions of the skin and of far less severity than scarlet fever. Moreover, Duda is not at all certain that Mozart’s other illnesses, which have been regarded as outbreaks of rheumatic fever, were not common cases of the grippe. Unimpressed by the speculation that Mozart’s toothaches may have involved harmful focal infections, he points out that Mozart’s sister, who was exposed to and suffered most of the same childhood illnesses as Mozart, lived to the age of seventy-eight. Duda also emphasizes the lack of evidence that Mozart himself had any substantial illness between 1784 and the last year of his life.
Dr. Kerner believes that the characteristics of Mozart’s last illness more closely resemble those of mercury poisoning than of the last stages of a chronic kidney illness. No contemporaries relate that Mozart complained of thirst, which Kerner associates with chronic nephritis. He also notes that Mozart was conscious until shortly before his death, worked actively to the last, and, during the final months of his life, composed some of his greatest masterpieces. In contrast with this spectacular creative activity, it is Kerner’s experience that “uremics are always for weeks and usually months before their death unable to work and for days before their death are unconscious.” Kerner accepts the contemporary report that Mozart first became ill in Prague and assumes that small doses of mercury were given to him in the summer of 1791, followed by a lethal dose close to the time of his death. Noting that in the Vienna of Mozart’s time mercury was in limited use as a remedy for syphilis, Kerner states that such use was introduced by Dr. Gerhard van Swieten, whose son Mozart knew. From such observations a commentator has erroneously read the Kerner study as arguing that Mozart poisoned himself in an effort to cure himself of syphilis.
It is hard for a modern reader of these arguments to rid himself of the prejudice against regarding a poisoning as anything but an exotic possibility. Unfortunately, and for good experiential reasons, it was not so regarded in the eighteenth century. Gunther Duda, in an effort to prepare his readers to accept his thesis, begins his book with the reminder that before firearms became generally available, poison was an extremely common weapon, and the subtle art of its use well-known. It is remarkable how many of Mozart’s contemporaries who figure in some manner in the controversies over his death regarded poisoning or suspicion of poisoning as risks to be taken quite seriously.
Even if the medical evidence and eighteenth-century experience do not exclude the poisoning of Mozart as a possibility, there has always been difficulty in identifying a murderer and finding an appropriate murder motive. Salieri has always been the prime candidate for the unhappy role of Mozart’s murderer. He fits this assignment imperfectly at best. Although (in large part due to the effect of the murder legend) time has not been kind to Salieri’s musical reputation, he was undoubtedly one of the leading composers of his period and an important teacher of composition, counting among his pupils Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Hummel, Süssmayr, and Meyerbeer. He was also a famous teacher of singing. All his students loved and respected him. Friends remembered him as generous, warm, and kind-hearted, and he even had the ability to laugh at himself (at least at his difficulties with the German language). He must have had a way with people, since he apparently established a close personal relationship with the difficult Beethoven.
However, the musicians whose careers Salieri helped to forward shared an advantage that Mozart lacked—they all had the good fortune not to be competitors of Salieri in the composition of Italian opera. There seems little question but that he was a formidable professional opponent of Mozart, although they appear to have been able to sustain correct and even superficially friendly social relationships. Salieri enjoyed a competitive supremacy over Mozart and many other aspiring composers in Vienna, and only partly because of the undoubtedly high regard in which his contemporaries held Salieri’s own operatic works. Of far greater importance in his ascendancy was the fact that because of his favor with Joseph II until the emperor’s death in 1790, and because of his successive roles as court composer, director of the Italian Opera, and court conductor, Salieri was able to wield powerful influence over the availability of theaters and patronage. Mozart, his father, and many of their contemporaries believed that Salieri had caused the emperor to be unfavorably disposed toward The Abduction from the Seraglio and had also been responsible for the later plot (fortunately unsuccessful) to induce the court to hamper the opening of The Marriage of Figaro. In his letters to his father, Mozart also accused Salieri of having prevented him from obtaining as a piano pupil the princess of Württemberg. In December 1789 Mozart wrote to his fellow Freemason and benefactor, Michael Puchberg, that next time they met he would tell him about Salieri’s plots “which, however, have completely failed.”
Although Mozart was undoubtedly very sensitive about barriers to his career, his feeling that Salieri used court influence to frustrate his musical competitors is borne out in the memoirs of tenor Michael Kelly and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, who worked with both Mozart and Salieri and were on friendly terms with each. Kelly refers to Salieri as “a clever, shrewd man, possessed of what Bacon called crooked wisdom” and adds that Salieri’s effort to have one of his operas selected for performance instead of The Marriage of Figaro was “backed by three of the principal performers, who formed a cabal not easily put down.” Da Ponte blames attempts to disrupt rehearsals of Figaro on the opera impresario Count Orsini-Rosenberg and a rival librettist, Casti, rather than directly on Salieri, although both men appear to have been in Salieri’s camp. He also remarks that before he came to the rescue, “Mozart had, thanks to the intrigues of his rivals, never been able to exercise his divine genius in Vienna.” Da Ponte was a slippery man with an elastic memory; it is probably fair to attribute to him the assessment of Salieri that he claimed to have heard from the lips of Emperor Leopold: “I know all his intrigues. . . . Salieri is an insufferable egoist. He wants successes in my theatre only for his own operas and his own women. . . . He is an enemy of all composers, all singers, all Italians; and above all, my enemy, because he knows that I know him.”
Nevertheless, there is much to suggest that Salieri’s hostility toward Mozart did not extend to the sphere of personal relations. He was one of the small group of mourners who followed Mozart’s coffin as it was carried from the funeral service at St. Stephen’s Cathedral toward the cemetery, making a greater display of public grief over Mozart’s death than Constanze, who stayed at home, supposedly still overcome by her husband’s death. Moreover, Salieri later became the teacher of Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Wolfgang and in 1807 gave him a written testimonial that procured him his first musical appointment.
It is difficult to decide whether Constanze or the Mozart family gave any credence to the rumors against Salieri. Would Constanze have entrusted the musical education of her son to a man she believed to be the murderer of his father? Nissen’s biography contains an allusion to Salieri’s rivalry but rejects the poisoning charges. Nissen reports that Constanze attributed Mozart’s suspicion of poisoning to illness and overwork. Moreover, he included in his biography an anonymous account of Mozart’s early death that was published in 1803. The quoted article dismisses the possibility of poisoning and attributes Mozart’s fears to “pure imagination.” Nissen’s biography was undoubtedly written and compiled with Constanze’s blessing. However, as witnessed by her conversations with the Novellos, which took place at approximately the same time as the appearance of the biography, Constanze never put Mozart’s suspicions out of her mind. Her preoccupation with this subject reappears a decade later in a letter written to a Munich official, quoted by Kerner in his study, to the effect that “her son Wolfgang Xaver knew that he would not, like his father, have to fear envious men who had designs on his life.” Her other son, Karl, on his death in 1858, left behind a handwritten commentary in which there is further discussion of the poisoning of Mozart—this time by a “vegetable poison.”
The views of Mozart’s contemporaries as to Salieri’s guilt doubtlessly divided along lines of personal or musical loyalties. In the years 1823 through 1825, partisans of Salieri rallied to the defense of his reputation in the face of widely circulated reports that he had confessed to the murder and attempted suicide by cutting his throat. When Kapellmeister Johann Gottfried Schwanenberg, a friend of Salieri’s, was read a newspaper account of the rumor that Mozart had fallen victim of Salieri’s envy, he shouted, “Crazy people! He [Mozart] did nothing to deserve such an honor.” But believers in the poisoning rumors were tireless and ingenious in spreading their gospel. At a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna on May 23, 1824, leaflets containing a poem that pictured Salieri as Mozart’s rival “standing by his side with the poisoned cup” were distributed to concertgoers. Giuseppe Carpani, a friend of Salieri and an early biographer of Haydn, responded with an effective public relations campaign on behalf of his maligned compatriot. He published a letter he had received in June 1824 from Dr. Guldener, who had not attended Mozart but had spoken to Mozart’s physician, Dr. Closset. The latter had advised him, Guldener wrote, that Mozart’s fatal illness had been a rheumatic and inflammatory fever that attacked many people in Vienna in 1791. Dr. Guldener added that in view of the large number of people who had seen Mozart during his illness and the experience and industry of Dr. Closset, “it could not have escaped their notice then if even the slightest trace of poisoning had manifested itself.” (Presumably Dr. Closset was quite industrious after theater hours.) Carpani appended the text of Guldener’s letter to his own article defending Salieri’s innocence. The Salieri press campaign also included a statement by the two men who served as Salieri’s keepers in his last years of declining health. They attested that they had been with him day and night and had never heard him confess the murder.
The views of Beethoven on the poisoning rumors have always been intriguing because of his love of Mozart’s music and his friendship with Salieri. We know from the entries in his conversation books that Beethoven’s callers gossiped about the case with him. In late 1823 publisher Johann Schickh referred to Salieri’s unsuccessful suicide attempt. In the following year Beethoven’s nephew Karl and his friend and future biographer Anton Schindler discussed the reports of Salieri’s confession of the poisoning, and Karl, in May 1825, the month of Salieri’s death, mentioned the persistence of the rumors. It is generally agreed that Beethoven did not believe Salieri was guilty. He was fond of referring to himself as Salieri’s pupil, and after Mozart’s death he dedicated the violin sonatas Opus 12 (1797) to Salieri and wrote a set of ten piano variations on a duet from Salieri’s charming opera Falstaff (1798). Nevertheless, wagging tongues delighted in passing along a spurious anecdote that Rossini, when he had induced Salieri to take him to visit Beethoven at his Vienna home, was angrily turned away at the door with the words, “How dare you come to my house with Mozart’s poisoner?”
The irony of the Beethoven–Rossini anecdote lies in the fact that the lives of both men were touched by fears and rumors of poisoning. Beethoven believed that his hated sister-in-law Johanna had poisoned his brother and intended to poison his nephew. Rossini’s mourning for the early death of his friend Vincenzo Bellini in Paris was followed by rumors of poisoning, as was Salieri’s attendance at Mozart’s funeral. But the Bellini poisoning legend was cut down in its infancy as a result of decisive action on the part of Rossini. Francis Toye writes that “Rossini, unwilling, perhaps, to figure as a second Salieri, insisted on an autopsy, which put an end to the rumor once and for all.” It almost appears that Salieri was the only musical protagonist in the case who is not reported to have been subject to fears of poisoning. However, we have the intriguing biographical note that Salieri, though from a land of wine, drank only water. His modest drink, unlike headier beverages, would have given his taste buds early warning should an enemy have surreptitiously added a splash of aqua toffana.
Most of Mozart’s principal biographers have either held aloof from the poisoning theory or rejected it outright. Franz Niemetschek appears to straddle the issue. Although he purported to blame lack of exercise and overwork for Mozart’s death, he left room for a more sinister possibility: “These were probably the chief causes of his untimely death (if, in fact, it was not hastened unnaturally).” He also attributed Emperor Joseph’s critical remarks about The Abduction from the Seraglio to “the cunning Italians” and added that “Mozart had enemies too, numerous, irreconcilable enemies, who pursued him even after his death.” These enemies, including Salieri, were still alive, and Niemetschek, whatever his suspicions, could not very well have gone much further in pointing a finger.
Edward Holmes was the first to exonerate Salieri expressly. He relegated the poisoning legend to a footnote and concluded that “Salieri, the known inveterate foe of Mozart, was fixed upon as the imaginary criminal.” Otto Jahn, in his great study of Mozart, continued to keep the charges of poisoning imprisoned in a footnote and referred to the suspicions of Salieri’s guilt as “shameful.” Hermann Abert preserves Jahn’s fleeting reference to the murder legend and observes that Mozart’s suspicion of poisoning evidenced his “morbidly overstimulated emotional state.” Arthur Schurig blames Mozart’s death on a severe grippe. Alfred Einstein not only fails to dignify the poisoning tradition by any mention but even finds the only explanation for Salieri’s animosity in Mozart’s “wicked tongue.” Eric Blom and Nicolas Slonimsky have rejected the possibility of murder but have fortunately taken the trouble to chronicle some of the excesses of the various murder theories. However, both Russia and Germany have in our time produced writers who claim to have found “historical” evidence that not only supports the murder thesis but reveals a political motive for the crime and for the prevention of its detection.
Soviet musicologist Igor Boelza (or Belza), in his brochure Motsart i Sal’eri, published in Moscow in 1953, exhibits a chain of hearsay evidence to the effect that Salieri’s priest made a written report of his confession to the murder. He claims that the late Soviet academician Boris Asafiev told him that he had been shown the report by Guido Adler, also deceased. Boelza states that Adler had also spoken of the document to “colleagues and numerous scholars,” none of whom is named in the brochure. According to Boelza, Adler engaged in a detailed study of the dates and circumstances of the meetings of Mozart and Salieri and established that they bore out the facts of the confession and satisfied the classic element of “opportunity.” But Adler apparently was no more ready to publish his Inspector French–style timetable than he was willing to publish the Salieri confession itself. It is small wonder that Alexander Werth, in commenting on Boelza’s book, remarks, “It looks as if the Adler mystery has taken the place of the Salieri mystery.”
Boelza also seeks support for the murder case in the mysterious circumstances of Mozart’s funeral and burial, which German writers like to refer to as die Grabfrage (the burial question). Posterity has always been puzzled by the fact that only a few friends (including Salieri) accompanied the funeral procession, and that even they turned back before arriving at the cemetery. The burial was that of a poor man, and Mozart’s body was placed in an unmarked grave. These bitter facts, so inappropriate to memorializing the passing of a great genius and a man who had loving friends and family, have been variously explained, and even the explanation least flattering to Mozart’s circle usually falls short of implication of criminal conduct. Constanze’s absence and the mourners’ desertion before the cemetery gates have traditionally been blamed on a wintry storm, but this explanation is belied both by a contemporary diary and by an intelligent modern inquiry made by Nicolas Slonimsky at the Viennese weather archives. Nissen does not mention the weather in his biography and attributes Constanze’s absence to her overpowering grief. The poverty of the burial has sometimes been taken to reflect the stinginess of Mozart’s friends and patrons, notably of Baron van Swieten, though others have claimed that the burial was in keeping with the surviving spirit of decrees of Emperor Joseph II enacted in 1784 and repealed in the following year. These decrees, inspired by the reforming emperor’s dislike for the pomp of burial, had provided that the dead not be buried in coffins but merely sewn in sacks and covered with quicklime and had also abolished most of the funeral ceremonies.
In Boelza’s version, all the events of Mozart’s interment take on a more sinister significance. He conjures up a plot headed by Baron van Swieten and joined by all of the composer’s acquaintances and relatives (with the exception of Constanze). On van Swieten’s orders, all the mourners departed on the way to the grave and the body was intentionally interred in unmarked ground. In supplying a motive for this strange plot to suppress traces of the murder, Boelza brings the case into the political arena and adds a Marxist twist. It seems that van Swieten was afraid that “nationalist upheavals” would result if the working masses of imperialist Vienna learned of the report that Mozart had been poisoned by a court musician and, what was worse, by a foreigner.
German writers have produced a rival tradition that Mozart was murdered by his Freemason brethren. The Masonic murder theory apparently originated in 1861 with Georg Friedrich Daumer, a researcher of antiquities and a religious polemicist. Daumer’s work was elaborated in the Nazi period, notably by General Erich Ludendorrf and his wife, Mathilde, who were so fired by enthusiasm for their revelations that they devoted the family press to the propagation of their indictment of the Freemasons.
The case against the Freemasons takes a number of lines. Daumer claimed that Mozart had not fully carried out Masonry’s “party line” in The Magic Flute. Mozart, in his view, had offended the Masons by his excessive attachment to the figure of the Queen of the Night and by his use of Christian religious music in the chorale of the Men of Armor. Daumer also believed that the murder thwarted Mozart’s plan to establish his own secret lodge, to be called “The Grotto.” Mathilde Ludendorrf built on Daumer’s imaginings. She preferred, however, another explanation of the Masons’ outrage at The Magic Flute. She believed that Mozart had hidden beneath the pro-Masonic surface of the opera a secret counterplot that depicted Mozart (Tamino) seeking the release of Marie Antoinette (Pamina) from her Masonic captors. Mathilde Ludendorrf, like Igor Boelza, added an element of nationalism. She claimed that the murder was also motivated by the opposition of the Freemasons to Mozart’s hope of establishing a German opera theater in Vienna. Both Daumer and Mathilde Ludendorrf related Mozart’s death to other murders of famous men in which they likewise saw the Masonic hand at work. Daumer’s conviction of the correctness of his view of Mozart’s death was reinforced by his belief that the Freemasons had also murdered Lessing, Leopold II, and Gustav III of Sweden (who was assassinated at the famous masked ball only a few months after Mozart’s death). Mathilde Ludendorrf expanded this list of victims to include Schiller and, in a virtuoso display of freedom from chronology, Martin Luther as well.
It is not surprising that the Ludendorrf writings have a heavy overlay of anti-Semitism. General Ludendorrf claimed that the secret of Masonry was the Jew and that its aim was to rob the Germans of their national pride and to ensure the “glorious future of the Jewish people.” He attempted to establish a Jewish role in Mozart’s murder by commenting mysteriously that Mozart had died “on the Day of Jehovah.” The combination of anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic prejudices had been common since the nineteenth century and was intensified at the turn of the century in the heat of passions generated by the Dreyfus affair. It is ironic to observe this marriage of hates in retroactive operation in the Mozart case, since Masonic lodges of the eighteenth century generally excluded Jews from membership. There is reason to speculate, at least, that Mozart himself did not develop the racist insanity so many of his countrymen showed in later periods of history. Paul Nettl observes that if he had done so, the world would have lost the fruits of his collaboration with the talented Jewish librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. To be regarded as further evidence of Mozart’s receptivity to the ideas of Jewish writers is the catalog of his library of books left at his death, which lists a work on the immortality of the soul by Moses Mendelssohn.
The anti-Masonic murder theory, like the Boelza theory, assumes a conspiracy of Mozart’s friends and family. Mathilde Ludendorrf incriminates Salieri, van Swieten, and even the mysterious messenger who commissioned the Requiem. She accuses this oddly assorted group of slowly poisoning Mozart and of employing Nissen to cover up the crime in his biography. Constanze is, as a good and loyal housewife, spared any suggestion of involvement. However, as in Boelza’s theory, her absence from the burial and its strange character are removed from the plane of personal and financial circumstance and explained by the conscious design of the conspirators. Frau Ludendorff even supplies the ghoulish hypothesis that the burial conformed to requirements of Masonry that the body of a transgressor against its laws must be denied decent burial.
Strangely enough, the Masonic murder legend has also been denied burial. Dr. Gunther Duda, whose medical views of the case have already been cited, is a “true believer” in the research of Daumer and the Ludendorffs. His book Gewiss, man hat mir Gift gegeben (“I am sure I have been poisoned”), a comprehensive study of Mozart’s death written in 1958, is prefaced with a quotation from Mathilde Ludendorrf. He views the charges against the Masons as having been established with the same compelling force as a mathematical or logical formula. He supports the condemnation of the Masons by the following syllogism, all of the links in which he accepts as fact: (1) Mozart was a Mason; (2) the Masonic lodges claimed the right to sentence disobedient members to death; (3) Mozart was a disobedient member; and (4) the execution of the Masonic death sentence is evidenced by Mozart’s death, the manner in which he died, and the circumstances of his burial. However, Duda’s zeal for his cause carries him well beyond the bounds of medical history or even plain logic. Faced with the question of why the Masons would have punished only Mozart but not the librettists of The Magic Flute as well, he notes with suspicion the sudden deaths of the two men who may have collaborated on the libretto. The principal librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, died in 1812 (twenty-one years after the opera’s premiere), and Karl Ludwig Gieseke, who may also have had some role in shaping the libretto, died in 1833. Duda must surely be suggesting that the Freemasons had at their disposal the slowest poison in the annals of crime.
Kerner, in the 1967 edition of his study of Mozart’s death, does not expressly join in the accusations against Freemasonry. However, his sober medical discussion passes at the end of his work into a vapor of astrology and symbolism that may enshroud suggestions of conspiracy. He points out that a “Hermes stele” pictured on the left side of an engraving on the frontispiece of the first libretto of The Magic Flute contains eight allegories of Mercury, the god who gave his name to the poison that Kerner believes killed Mozart. The engraving was made by the Freemason Ignaz Alberti. The allusion to Mercury in Alberti’s frontispiece indicates to Kerner that more people were “in the know” about the murder than is generally assumed. He demonstrates the continuity of this secret knowledge over the centuries by observing that the special Mozart postage stamp issued by Austria in 1956 shows eight Mercury allegories in its frame. Kerner passes from iconography to alchemy and then to sinister hints. He states that in the symbolism of the alchemists, the number eight as well as the color gray represented the planet Mercury, “which reawakens lively associations of thought with the ‘Gray Messenger,’ who often put Mozart in fear in his last days.”
Neither Dr. Duda nor Dr. Kerner attempts to reconcile with the Masonic murder theory their shared medical assumption that Mozart’s poisoning began in the summer of 1791, before The Magic Flute was first performed. Moreover, if Mozart was out of favor with his Masonic brethren, a mind disinclined to conspiratorial thinking would find it hard to explain either the commission he received shortly before his death to compose a Masonic cantata or the emotional oration that was delivered to a Masonic lodge in memory of Mozart and was printed in 1792 by the very same Freemason Alberti whose “Hermes stele” struck Kerner as suspicious.
The elements of conspiratorial thinking and exoticism have recently been supplied in abundant measure. Since the publication of their separate research, Kerner and Duda have, in collaboration with Johannes Dalchow, written two books that make more explicit their incrimination of the Masons as the murderers of Mozart. As elaborated in Mozarts Tod (1971), Masonry’s involvement in Mozart’s death was complex and premeditated. According to the authors (who in this respect, as in many others, parrot the writings of Mathilde Ludendorrf), the “gray messenger” ordering the Requiem was not the agent of Count von Walsegg but an emissary of the Masons announcing their death sentence. What was the reason for Mozart’s murder? The authors provide two possibilities and like them both so well they do not choose between them: (1) a “ritual murder” in which Mozart was offered as a sacrifice to the Masonic deities; and (2) a punishment of Mozart by the Masons, with the participation of Salieri, for the crime of having revealed Masonic secrets in The Magic Flute. The authors engage in an extended numerological exegesis of The Magic Flute that they believe proves the Masonic murder (and presumably also Mozart’s acceptance of his execution). The authors assert that the number eighteen is paramount in the music and libretto of the opera, by intentional association with the eighteenth Rosicrucian degree of Masonry, and that Mozart’s death was also scheduled to give prominence to this number. It is observed with triumph by Kerner and his colleagues that Mozart’s Masonic cantata was performed on November 18, 1791, exactly eighteen days before his death! Amid all this mystification the medical research of the authors has come to play a minor role, and the bigoted spirit of Mathilde Ludendorrf lives again.
The novelists have, since the very year of Salieri’s death, had a field day with the theme of the poisoning. The succession of bad novels that stress the poisoning has continued unabated to our own day; certainly in the running for honors as the worst novel on the poisoning is David Weiss’s The Assassination of Mozart, which summons up a vision (straight out of John Le Carré and Len Deighton) of a reactionary Austrian regime giving tacit approval to Salieri’s murder of Mozart and ruthlessly suppressing every attempt to investigate the crime.
However, the poisoning tradition has produced one authentic masterpiece, Pushkin’s short dramatic dialogue Mozart and Salieri, conceived in 1826 (only one year after Salieri’s death), when the rumors of his confession were still in the air, and completed in 1830. In the Pushkin play (later set by Rimsky-Korsakov as an opera), Salieri poisons Mozart both because Mozart’s superior gifts have made Salieri’s lifelong devotion to music meaningless and because Mozart has introduced Salieri’s soul to the bitterness of envy. Unlike many of Mozart’s later admirers, Pushkin does not depict Salieri as a mediocre hack but rather as a dedicated musician who was intent on the perfection of his craft and who was able to appreciate innovative genius (as in the case of his master, Gluck) and to assimilate it into his own development. However, Salieri refers to himself as a “priest” of music to whom his art is holy and serious. He is enraged by Mozart’s free, creative spirit and by what he sees as Mozart’s lighthearted, almost negligent, relation to the products of his genius. Salieri’s assessment of his rival is confirmed for him by the joy Mozart takes in a dreadful performance of an air from Figaro by a blind fiddler. As was true in their real lives, both Salieri and Mozart in Pushkin’s pages inhabit a world where poisoning is assumed to be a possible event even in the lives of famous and civilized men. Mozart refers to the rumor that “Beaumarchais once poisoned someone,” and Salieri alludes to a tradition that Michelangelo committed murder to obtain a dead model for a crucifixion. In Pushkin’s play the murder of Mozart brings no relief for Salieri’s torment but only furnishes final proof of his inferiority. At the close of the play Salieri is haunted by Mozart’s observation immediately before being poisoned that “genius and crime are two incompatible things.”
Even if we suspect that the play has attributed to Salieri more subtlety as a criminal than he displayed in years of crude plotting against Mozart’s musical career, Pushkin possibly comes closer to explaining how Salieri could have made a confession of guilt than does the inconclusive medical evidence or reference to Viennese court intrigue or Masonic plots. Salieri might have recognized the depth of the animosity he had harbored. He might have come to the understanding that, if the essential life of a divinely gifted composer is in his art, he and others who had stood again and again between Mozart and his public had, with malice aforethought, set out to “murder” Mozart. Pushkin’s view of the criminality of selfish opposition to artistic greatness is incisively stated in a brief comment he wrote in 1832 on the origin of the poisoning legend. Pushkin records that at the premiere of Don Giovanni, the enthralled audience was shocked to hear hissing and to see Salieri leaving the hall “in a frenzy and consumed by envy.” The note concludes: “The envious man who was capable of hissing at Don Giovanni was capable of poisoning its creator.”
There is more reason to attribute to Salieri the symbolic crime of attempted “murder” of a brother artist’s work than to speculate that Salieri was a poisoner. This judgment would be supported by the testimony of Ignaz Moscheles. Moscheles, who was a former pupil of Salieri and who loved him dearly, visited the old man in the hospital shortly before his death. According to Moscheles’s account, Salieri hinted at the poisoning rumors and tearfully protested his innocence. Although Moscheles wrote that he was greatly moved by the interview and that he had never given the rumors the slightest belief, he added the following comment: “Morally speaking he [Salieri] had no doubt by his intrigues poisoned many an hour of Mozart’s existence.” In his fictional account of the Salieri protestation, Bernard Grun attributes Moscheles’s comment about moral guilt to Salieri himself, thus harmonizing the interview with the rumors of Salieri’s “confession.” According to the Novellos’ journal, Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Wolfgang expressed a similar view, namely that Salieri had not murdered his father but that “he may truly be said to have poisoned his life and this thought . . . pressed upon the wretched man when dying.”
If Moscheles’s narrative is accepted, many events become easier to explain. Salieri’s delight over The Magic Flute may have been genuine. It is possible that even in Mozart’s lifetime Salieri finally acknowledged Mozart’s genius and tempered his own feeling of rivalry. Tardy recognition of Mozart’s greatness (and, perhaps, regret for their estrangement) may also account for Salieri’s attendance at the funeral and his kindness to Mozart’s son.
If Salieri was guilty of hostility toward Mozart’s art but not of poisoning the artist, his punishment can only be called “cruel and unusual.” After all, Salieri’s plots against Mozart’s fame ultimately failed, and yet he was long punished—by reason of the evil legend that clings to his name—with almost total obscurity for his own music. For many years only minor instrumental works of Salieri were available on commercial recordings. The situation is now changing for some of the operas that made Salieri’s reputation, including Les Danaïdes and Falstaff, which have been released on CDs. Perhaps the time has arrived to turn from the documentation of Mozart’s death to a closer investigation of the music of Salieri. Perhaps such a study will provide evidence that even without his adroitness in Viennese opera politics and his prestigious positions, Salieri would have afforded substantial musical competition to Mozart.
An English translation of letters of Mozart and his family is Emily Anderson, ed. and trans., The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966). Leopold Mozart’s administration of “black powder” and “margrave powder” to young Wolfgang is referred to in a letter of October 30, 1762 (p. 9).
A selective list of reminiscences and biographies of Mozart include: Hermann Abert, W. A. Mozart, 2 vols., 7th ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1955–56), 2:693; Georg Friedrich Daumer, Aus der Mansarde (Mainz: Verlag von Franz Kirchheim, 1861), 4:1–184; Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, 2nd ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1966), 432, 523; Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 86; Edward Holmes, The Life of Mozart (1845; reprint, London: J. M. Dent, 1939), 279n1; Otto Jahn, The Life of Mozart, trans. Pauline D. Townsend, 3 vols. (London: Novello, Ewer, 1882), 3:354n7; Lorenzo da Ponte, Memoirs of Lorenzo da Ponte (New York: Orion, 1959), 67, 100; Charlotte Moscheles, ed., Recent Music and Musicians as Described in the Diaries and Correspondence of Ignatz Moscheles (New York: Holt, 1873), 59; Franz Niemetschek, Life of Mozart (London: Leonard Hyman, 1956), 43; Georg Nissen, Biographie W. A. Mozarts (Leipzig: G. Senf, 1828), 563–64, 572; Vincent Novello and Mary Novello, A Mozart Pilgrimage (London: Novello, 1955), 125, 127–28; Michael Kelly, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, 2 vols. (1826; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1968), 1:254; Arthur Schurig, Wolfgang Amade Mozart, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923), 2:374.
Books and articles on the death of Mozart include the following sources in English, German, and Russian: Carl Bär, Mozart-Krankheit-Tod-Begräbnis (Salzburg: Salzburger Druckerei, 1966); Eric Blom, “Mozart’s Death,” Music and Letters 38 (1957): 320–26; Igor Boelza (Belza), Motsart i Sal’eri (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1953), and Boelza’s supplementary 1962 essay, Motsart i Sal’eri (Ob istoricheskoi dostovernosti tragedii Pushkina), http://feb-web.ru/feben/pushkin/serial/im4/im4-237-htm?cmd=2 (accessed July 23, 2009); Johannes Dalchow, Gunther Duda, and Dieter Kerner, W. A. Mozart—Die Dokumentation seines Todes (Pähl: Bebenburg, 1966), and Mozarts Tod 1791–1971 (Pähl: Hohe Warte Bebenburg, 1971); Gunther Duda, “Gewiss, man hat mir Gift gegeben” (Pähl: Hohe Warte, 1958); Dieter Kerner, Krankheiten Grosser Musiker (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 1967); C. G. Sederholm, “Mozart’s Death,” Music and Letters 32 (1951): 345; Nicolas Slonimsky, “The Weather at Mozart’s Funeral,” Musical Quarterly 46 (1960): 12–21; William Stafford, The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991); Alexander Werth, “Was Mozart Poisoned?” New Statesman, Apr. 14, 1961, 580, 582.
Ties between anti-Semitism and anti-Masonic prejudice are considered in Paul Nettl’s Mozart and Masonry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 85.
Art historian Kenneth Clark commented on Joseph Lange’s portrait of Mozart in Clark’s Civilisation (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1971), 240.
Salieri’s character is rehabilitated in Volmar Braunbehren’s Maligned Master: The Real Story of Antonio Salieri (New York: Fromm International, 1992).
Three scientific researchers have recently concluded that Mozart died of a streptococcal infection contracted in an epidemic of that affliction in Vienna: Richard H. C. Zegers, Andreas Weigl, and Andrew Steptoe, “The Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: An Epidemiologic Perspective,” Annals of Internal Medicine 151, no. 4 (Aug. 18, 2009), 274–78. The authors surmise that the streptococcus led to an acute nephritic syndrome.
Among novels based on Mozart’s death are: Bernard Grun, The Golden Quill (New York: Putnam, 1956), wherein Grun attributes Moscheles’s comment about Salieri’s “moral guilt” to Salieri himself (366); Michael Levey, The Life and Death of Mozart (New York: Stein and Day, 1971); David Weiss, The Assassination of Mozart (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970).
The two principal dramas based on the “murder” of Mozart are Alexander Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri, in The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin (New York: Random House, 1936); and Peter Shaffer, Amadeus (London: André Deutsch, 1980).
In the revision of Amadeus for American audiences, the elderly Salieri, contemplating suicide, asserts that he is innocent of murdering Mozart but has been falsely confessing the crime so as to be remembered in infamy. See Albert Borowitz, Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2005), 140–41.