Mozart died on December 5, 1791 at the age of thirty-five. His burial has become one of the most repeated stories in music, and most of it does not hold up.
The Horror
Mozart died at his home in Vienna, with the parish register giving the cause as “severe miliary fever”, which is not the name of a disease. Baron Gottfried van Swieten arranged the funeral. After a service at St Stephen’s Cathedral he was buried at St Marx Cemetery, on December 7 according to Grove.
The belief that he was thrown into a pauper’s grave is described as without foundation. “Common grave” meant a non-aristocratic citizen’s grave. It was an individual grave, but after ten years the city could dig it up and reuse it, a practice from which aristocratic graves were spared. Otto Jahn wrote in 1856 that Salieri, Süssmayr, van Swieten and two other musicians were present.
When the site was sought, it could not be found. The widow looked for it 17 years after his death, and Vincent Novello failed to find it in 1829. A gravestone put up in 1855 at the presumed spot was later moved to the musicians’ graves at the Zentralfriedhof.
The Legend
The famous scene of a storm, a handful of mourners turning back at the Stuben Gate and the coffin carried out to the grave alone comes from Joseph Deiner’s account, published in the Vienna Morgen-Post on January 28, 1856. His weather contradicts the records. Zinzendorf wrote of mild weather and frequent mist on December 6, and the Vienna Observatory logged temperatures of about 38 degrees Fahrenheit with a weak east wind. The scene is unconfirmed.
The skull is a separate legend. The gravedigger Joseph Rothmayer is said to have unearthed Mozart’s skull about ten years after the burial. The main Wikipedia account says only that the skull was saved by the successor of the gravedigger who supervised the burial, and the sources disagree on the man.
The Modern Relic
What may have been Mozart’s skull was exhumed in 1801. It passed to the anatomist Josef Hyrtl, then to the Salzburg municipality and the Mozarteum, which obtained it in 1902. It was displayed until 1940, when it was locked in a safe. Examined in 1989 to 1991, it showed “substantial concordance” with Mozart’s portraits after forensic reconstruction.
In January 2006 an Austrian television project compared DNA from the skull with samples from two skeletons in a Salzburg family grave believed to hold Mozart’s grandmother and niece. The two skeletons were unrelated to each other and to the skull, so the skull could not be shown to be Mozart’s. Walther Parson of Innsbruck said the identity of those in the family grave “has proven to be a mystery”. Whether the skull is Mozart’s is unconfirmed.
The memorial now at St Marx was refurbished in 1950 by the Viennese sculptor Florian Josephu-Drouot. It marks a spot that is presumed, not proved, to be his.
