Mozart Dies at 35: Classical Music Loses Its Genius

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna on December 5, 1791, at the age of thirty-five. The cause of death has never been definitively established, and the medical debate has continued for over two centuries: rheumatic fever, kidney disease, trichinosis from undercooked pork, mercury poisoning, and Henoch-Schonlein purpura have all been proposed by physicians and historians working from fragmentary accounts of his final symptoms. He was buried in a common grave at St. Marx Cemetery, in accordance with Viennese burial regulations of the period that prohibited elaborate interments for commoners. The burial was not a mark of poverty or disgrace, as later romanticized accounts suggested, but standard practice for someone of his social class. The Requiem in D minor that he was composing when he died was left incomplete and was finished by his student Franz Xussmayr from sketches and verbal instructions. Exactly which portions Mozart completed and which Xussmayr composed or extrapolated has been debated by musicologists ever since, with particular controversy surrounding the Lacrimosa, which breaks off after eight bars in Mozart's hand. In his thirty-five years, he composed forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, twenty-three string quartets, eighteen masses, twenty-two operas, and hundreds of other works across every musical form of his era. He was paid well for his compositions during his lifetime but spent extravagantly on housing, clothing, and entertainment, dying with almost nothing in the bank. His wife Constanze survived him by fifty years and spent much of that time managing his posthumous reputation, correcting inaccuracies, and ensuring that his manuscripts were preserved and catalogued.