Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
When in August 1791 Mozart arrived in Prague to supervise the performance of his new opera La clemenza di Tito (K. 621), he was "already very ill".
One day when she was driving in the Prater with him, to give him a little distraction and amusement, and they were sitting by themselves, Mozart began to speak of death, and declared that he was writing the Requiem for himself.
"Constanze attempted to cheer her husband by persuading him to give up work on the Requiem for a while, encouraging him instead to complete the Freimaurerkantate (K. 623), composed to celebrate the opening of a new Masonic temple for Mozart's own lodge.
The view that Mozart was in near-steady decline and despair during the last several months of his life has been met with much skepticism in recent years.
Constanze's earliest account, published in Niemetschek's biography of 1798, states that Mozart 'told her of ... his wish to try his hand at this type of composition, the more so as the higher forms of church music had always appealed to his genius.'
Mozart's medical history is like an inverted pyramid: a small corpus of primary documentation supports a large body of secondary literature.
Mozart had health problems throughout his life, suffering from smallpox, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, rheumatism, and gum disease.
Borowitz summarizes: When Mozart appeared to be sinking, one of his doctors, Dr. Thomas Franz Closset, was sent for and finally located at the theater.
When he 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.
A left temporal fracture and concomitant erosions raise the question of a chronic subdural hematoma, which would be consistent with several falls in 1789 and 1790 and could have caused the weakness, headaches, and fainting Mozart experienced in 1790 and 1791.
Additionally, an episode of aggressive bloodletting used to treat suspected rheumatic fever on the night of December 4, 1791, could have decompensated such a lesion, leading to his death on the following day.
[16] In a 2000 publication, a team of two physicians (Faith T. Fitzgerald, Philip A. Mackowiak) and a musicologist (Neal Zaslaw) reviewed the historical evidence and tentatively opted for a diagnosis of rheumatic fever.
[19] A 2006 article in a UK medical journal considered several theories for Mozart's death and, based on his letters from his last year, dismisses syphilis and other chronic diseases.
(2009), breaking out of the limited-data regime lamented above by Stafford, did a post-hoc epidemiological study, examining all deaths that occurred in Vienna around the time Mozart died.
Our analysis is consistent with Mozart's last illness and death being due to a streptococcal infection leading to an acute nephritic syndrome caused by poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis.
[21] In a journal article from 2011, it was suggested that vitamin D deficiency could have played a role in Mozart's underlying medical conditions leading to his death.
Describing his funeral, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states, "Mozart was buried in a common grave, in accordance with contemporary Viennese custom, at the St. Marx Cemetery outside the city on 7 December."
Rain and snow fell at the same time, as if Nature wanted to shew her anger with the great composer's contemporaries, who had turned out extremely sparsely for his burial.
As the storm grew ever more violent, even these few friends determined to turn back at the Stuben Gate, and they betook themselves to the "Silver Snake".
[29]As Slonimsky notes,[30] the tale was widely adopted and incorporated into Mozart biographies, but Deiner's description of the weather is contrary to records kept of the previous day.
Mozart's musical reputation rose following his death; 20th-century biographer Maynard Solomon describes an "unprecedented wave of enthusiasm"[33] for his work after he died, and a number of publishers issued editions of his compositions.
They were at the first bars of the Lacrimosa when Mozart began to weep bitterly, laid the score on one side, and eleven hours later, at one o'clock in the morning (of 5 December 1791, as is well known), departed this life.
[38][39]Biographer Niemetschek relates a vaguely similar account, leaving out a rehearsal: On the day of his death he asked for the score to be brought to his bedside.
[41] An 1840 letter from the composer Ignaz von Seyfried states that on his last night, Mozart was mentally occupied with the currently running opera The Magic Flute.
Hofer is just taking her top F;—now my sister-in-law is singing her second aria, "Der Hölle Rache"; how strongly she strikes and holds the B-flat: "Hört!
'"[41] Mozart's older, seven-year-old, son Karl was present at his father's death and later wrote, "Particularly remarkable is in my opinion the fact that a few days before he died, his whole body became so swollen that the patient was unable to make the smallest movement, moreover, there was stench, which reflected an internal disintegration which, after death, increased to the extent that an autopsy was impossible.
