ANNIVERSARIES

5 DECEMBER 1791

Mozart meets an untimely end

The composer dies before finishing his last masterpiece

It is one of the most famous scenes in musical history. The brilliant composer, perhaps the greatest who ever lived, sits huddled in a coach in Vienna, talking to his wife about his unfinished Requiem. He is writing it, he says tearfully, for himself. “I feel definitely, that I will not last much longer; I am sure I have been poisoned. I cannot rid myself of this idea.”

As anyone who has seen the film Amadeus knows, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on 5 December 1791 after months of agonising illness, carried off amid a raging storm. Or did he?

In fact, most biographers believe Mozart was in good spirits before his death. The composer. The story that his rival, Antonio Salieri, had secretly commissioned it to drive him to his death is entirely false. So too is the myth that he died of syphilis. Probably he died of an infectious fever sweeping Vienna in the last weeks of 1791, the same disease that killed hundreds of others.