How did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart die?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
January 27, 1756 — December 5, 1791
Vienna, Austria
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart was born in Salzburg to a court musician who recognized within a few years that his son was the most gifted person he would ever meet, and who spent the rest of his life managing him. He was composing at five, touring the courts of Europe at seven, and dead at thirty-five, in a rented apartment in Vienna, with a Requiem on the desk that he had not finished and that someone else was paid to.
In between he wrote more than six hundred pieces, including most of the ones anyone can hum. He was short, pockmarked, fond of dirty jokes, bad with money, and, by the accounts of people who disliked him, impossible to be jealous of for long because he was so obviously what he was. He married Constanze Weber against his father's wishes and had six children, of whom two lived.
He was buried in a common grave at St. Marx cemetery, as was normal for a Viennese of his class in 1791, and the exact spot was forgotten within a few years. There is no body to examine, which is the beginning of every argument about him.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: "Hitziges Frieselfieber" (severe miliary fever), recorded in the parish death register, December 1791
He fell ill in Vienna in late November 1791, after returning from Prague in September and finishing The Magic Flute. The illness lasted about fifteen days. His sister-in-law Sophie Haibel, who was there, described swelling of his hands and feet so severe he could barely move, high fever, vomiting, and a rash; he remained conscious and lucid for most of it, working on the Requiem from bed and singing parts of it with friends on his last afternoon. He died just before 1 a.m. on December 5. He was 35.
The parish register gave the cause as "severe miliary fever," a description of symptoms (a fever with a rash of small bumps) rather than a disease. His physician, Thomas Closset, did not leave a diagnosis. There was no autopsy. Constanze later said that Mozart had told her, weeks before, that he believed he had been poisoned.
That remark, repeated in print in the 1820s, grew into the story that the court composer Antonio Salieri had poisoned him out of jealousy. Salieri, elderly and in a mental decline in 1823, was reported to have accused himself of it, and then to have retracted it; his caregivers said he had never been left alone with Mozart. The story became a play by Pushkin in 1830, an opera, and in 1984 the film Amadeus, which is how most living people met it.
In 2009 a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine examined Vienna's death records for the winter of 1791 and found a spike in deaths of young men from swelling-related illness in the weeks around Mozart's death, consistent with an epidemic of streptococcal infection.
What happened
The family hasn’t confirmed a cause. These are the community’s theories, in the order the community finds them most likely. Everyone here is anonymous.
A 35-year-old died in two weeks of fever and swelling, with no autopsy, and told his wife he thought he'd been poisoned. The world's most famous musician has had 150 proposed causes of death. Which one is it?
The page creator
- Most likely46 of 52 readers find this likely
A strep infection that reached his kidneys, during a Vienna epidemic
The 2009 epidemiological study is the strongest evidence anyone has produced: Vienna's death registers show an unusual number of young men dying with swelling in the weeks around December 1791, consistent with an outbreak of streptococcal disease. Strep that goes untreated can trigger kidney inflammation, and kidney failure produces exactly the picture Sophie described: enormous swelling, fever, vomiting, a rash, a lucid patient, death in about two weeks. It needs no villain and fits the records of a whole city, not just one man.
Anonymous. Says they are a nephrologist.
ReportThe page creator can confirm or correct this. - Also raised28 of 39 readers find this likely
Rheumatic fever, which he'd had as a child, coming back for his heart
He had several documented bouts of what was probably rheumatic fever as a boy. Rheumatic fever damages the heart valves, and a flare-up in adulthood can cause heart failure, whose signature is swelling and breathlessness. This was the leading medical theory for most of the twentieth century and is still defended. It and the kidney theory may describe the same strep infection doing damage to different organs.
Anonymous.
- Also raised21 of 34 readers find this likely
Bled to death by his own doctors
Bloodletting was the standard treatment for fever in 1791, and a seriously ill patient could be bled repeatedly over two weeks. Some writers calculate that Mozart lost as much as two liters of blood in his final days. A man already in kidney or heart failure, losing that much blood, would die faster. On this view the underlying illness might have been survivable and the treatment was what killed him. Hard to prove, hard to rule out.
Anonymous. Says they are a physician.
- Also raised9 of 31 readers find this likely
Trichinosis from undercooked pork
A 2001 paper noted a letter in which Mozart, six weeks before his illness, wrote about eating pork cutlets. Trichinosis, a parasitic infection from undercooked pork, incubates for about that long and produces fever, swelling (especially of the face and limbs), and a rash. It's a tidy fit on paper. The letter is the only evidence; everyone in Vienna ate pork.
Anonymous.
- Unlikely5 of 52 readers find this likely
Salieri poisoned him
The one everyone knows, from Pushkin to Amadeus. Mozart did tell his wife he thought he'd been poisoned, and an old, confused Salieri did reportedly accuse himself before taking it back. Against it: no poison known in 1791 produces two weeks of swelling and fever with a lucid patient; Salieri had no access to him; and Mozart said the same thing about being poisoned during an earlier illness too. Historians consider it closed. The vote count here measures something else.
Anonymous.
When the family confirms the cause, the confirmed answer moves to the top and gets this mark. Theories stay, but are labeled as what people thought before the family knew.
"Miliary fever" meant a fever with a rash like millet seeds. It is not a disease; it is what the illness looked like from the bedside. Modern writers have proposed well over a hundred diagnoses to fit the recorded symptoms, which tells you how little the symptoms constrain the answer.
The two features doctors keep coming back to are the massive swelling (edema) and the fever with rash in a man who had been healthy weeks before. Severe swelling in a young adult usually means the kidneys have stopped handling fluid properly. The most common reason for that in 1791, in a city with no antibiotics, was a strep infection that had moved to the kidneys (post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis). It also fits the city-wide spike in similar deaths that winter. Poison has never had a mechanism that fits the swelling.
Parish death register, St. Stephen's, Vienna, December 1791 Sophie Haibel's account of Mozart's final illness (letter to Georg Nissen, 1825) Zegers, Weigl and Steptoe, "The Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: An Epidemiologic Perspective," Annals of Internal Medicine, 2009 Peter J. Davies, Mozart in Person: His Character and Health (1989) Wikipedia, "Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"
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