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Eliadys Ortega

THE 2000

Amadeus Final Term Paper

Amadeus’ Mystery Death

Life is just joys and happiness, pains and sorrows, and who has not afraid of

things in life like death. Likewise, The New York Times refers to the play Amadeus by

Peter Shaffer writing that “Amadeus may be a play inspired by music and death, but it

fills the theater with that mocking, heavenly silence that is the overwhelming terror of

life”(). Peter Shaffer wrote this play in 1979 which won the Evening Standard Drama

Award and the Theatre Critics Award in London. It later was adapted to a film in 1984

winning eight Academy Awards between them he also won the Best Picture with this

film. The play Amadeus is basically about the life of the incomparable Wolfgang

Amadeus Mozart whose baptismal name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus

Theophilus Mozart. He lived in Vienna until his death at 35 years old at 1:00 AM on

December 5, 1791, 2 months before his 36th birthday, and after being blessed in front

of the Crucifix Chapel of St. Stephen's, Amadeus’ body was buried in a regular grave in

the cemetery at St. Marx which was a third class funeral that only cost about 8 fl. and 56

k. This play also explains how the envy of his marvelous music brings Antonio Salieri to

destroy Mozart’s life in a curious way, but it contains fiction and real history of the last

days of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who is almost certainly the most well-known

composer in the history of Western music, and as the significance of his name God’s
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love his works were brilliant like they were selected by God to express many feelings.

However, Amadeus is not a documentary biography of the composer, but it brought the

unquestionable mystery that Mozart’s death holds for us today. Also, this play is one of

the numerous latest attempts to use fascinated life of Mozart during the last two

hundred and fifty three years. Therefore, when I read the play the only thing that was

not clear to me was Mozart’s death, and there were a number of facts which do not

always match, and which were with no doubt just simplifications and alterations. In

general, the cause of Mozart's death cannot be known with certainty. Consequently, that

is why I select this topic to investigate more about the possibilities of murder or disease

in the early death of such an important figure in the world that had to contribute so many

things to the history of music.

First of all, Mozart was just a prodigy musician, who composed through his

entire life more than 600 fabulous works and people loved him. This can be seen in a

quote that I found which says "People living in societies undergoing the fundamental

transition from closed, customary and religious patterns of organization to more open,

individualistic, relativistic and secular systems experience with special intensity

humankind’s otherwise universal (since all human beings must abandon infancy) sense

of a lost past in which order, wholeness and certainty prevailed. It is in these periods

that the characteristic modern experiences of deracination, alienation and doubt arise

and in which people seek the new certainties of truth, virtue and beauty. No artist has

been more acutely aware of the deeply unsettling nature of that transition than Mozart;

(…). And no art has met modern humanity’s longing for wholesomeness and

reconciliation as has Mozart’s music."(Till, 1992) This quote explains how Mozart lived

and still living in people hearts. During his last year of life, Mozart wrote many of his
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most important creations like the opera The Magic Flute, the final piano concerto K. 595

in B-flat, the Clarinet Concerto K. 622, the last in his great series of string quintets K.

614 in E-flat, the motet Ave verum corpus K. 618, and the unfinished Requiem K. 626. It

is a rumor that Amadeus was cruelly murder because throughout the 19th century

supposed scandal and important people assassination were very common. The murder

option immediately appeared after Mozart’s death and obtained a big acceptability when

Antonio Salieri more than thirty years later while he was ill confessed his crime. Though,

also because his body did not become rigid and cold as normal, but as other case of

those who die from poisoning by plants, Mozart remained soft and elastic. Then

multiples responsible appeared in this transcendental death. This thought implicated

important people in Vienna at that time like the court composer, Salieri as mention

before who was jealous of Mozart because Mozart was child prodigy with a gift from

God, and he also seduced a beautiful singer, a pupil of Salieri’s. So, Salieri wanted to

destroy him no matter what he needed to do. Salieri in his last hour of life confessed the

crime of arsenic poisoning, “Mozart! Mozart! Perdonami!...Il tuo assassin ti chiede

perdono!”(Shaffer). Some people said that envy and antipathy drove Salieri to murder

his rival. Also, Peter Shaffer added that Salieri drove Mozart to his death by destroying

his career and then obligating him to finish the Requiem even when Mozart was

seriously ill. Moreover, Salieri visited Mozart the day before he died, and he also

attempted to his funeral on December, 6. However, Salieri and Mozart were friendly

enough, and Salieri spoke with respect to Amadeus as Constanze said that there were

not independent evidences that they were in bad terms. At the end, there were no clear

motive that he killed Mozart because he was who had been the Emperor Joseph II's

chief musician with higher salary, and greater wealth. Even though, the opinion

persisted that both of them were as polar enemies, the idea of Salieri crime was denied.
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Another people implicated in Amadeus’ death were The Freemasons which were a

fraternal organization which Amadeus was part of it himself, and the Masonic lodges

claimed the right to sentence disobedient members to death like Mozart who had badly

behaved in this organization; and the execution of the Masonic death sentence was

evidenced by Mozart’s death, including the manner in which he died and the

circumstances of his burial. This supposition about the Masonic murder was originated

many years after Mozart’s death exactly in 1861 by Georg Friedrich Daumer. Those

people hate him after he supposedly put their habits in the opera the Magic Flute on

September 30 the same year of his death, which either challenged their doctrines or

disclosed their secret rituals and common people laughed about those rituals. So they

believed that Mozart made fun of their organization in the society. However, there are

not strong evidences nowadays about that. People also believed that Franz Hofdemel

tried to kill Mozart because Amadeus had been a dishonorable womanizer. We saw this

very clear in his biography where he had some kind of intimate relationship with Franz’s

wife, Magdalena Hofdemel a 23 years old who was a student of him. This relationship

ended when Mozart married her sister Constanze. This rumor of Magdalena and Mozart

appeared on the day after Mozart’s funeral, and that same day a person found

Magdalena who was in her fifth month of pregnancy bleeding with her arms, face, and

neck cut by his husband who also cut his own throat with the same razor. Magdalena

was revived and gave birth to her son. So chitchats said that this baby boy was

Amadeus’ son. Then Franz found out that his wife was pregnant, and Mozart was the

father of the baby. Then he poisoned Mozart before trying to kill Magdalena and

committing his suicide. Not only this people were accused of killing Mozart, but also

Amadeus himself was accused of his death because he was a little out of his mind due

to the apparition of the men with the gray mask that ordered to write the Requiem, this
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character in the movie was represented by Salieri but not in the play. That’s why people

think that he takes a biggest dose of mercury for his syphilis causing his death. As a

final point, all these theories were discounted for the reason that his symptoms of

arsenic and mercury poisoning were failed to prove, and there were no obvious

evidences of this crime.

Through time, another explanation of how did Mozart died has been debated

from many years which is a terrible disease. Many physicians investigated the possible

illness in Vienna during 1791. Moreover, Mozart had health problems throughout his life,

suffering from many diseases. This brought many attempts to prove Mozart's last illness

from both medical and lay study making public the variety of non-poisonous causes like

uremia, henoch- schönlein purpura, infective endocarditis, and rheumatic fever.

Moreover, Mozart's worst symptoms soon came back, so he became bedridden on

November 20 and stayed in bed for 15 days until his death. That was why they became

to the conclusion that without a doubt Mozart had died from a disease in the dark age of

medicine in Vienna. The first illness was uremia which is an illness accompanying

kidney failure. It cost that urea and other waste products that normally have to go to the

urine become part of the blood in the body. Physicians speculated that Mozart had that

disease because his father, Leopold Mozart said that his son suffered from an illness in

1784 which ended each time of crisis with aggressive vomiting. Furthermore, he was

suffering from swelling, pain and vomiting many days before his death. When Mozart

was critically sick, an hour before his death to be specific he was accompanied by

Sophie. When she was trying to give her hope that he would not die, he replied “Why, I

already have the taste of death on my tongue.”(Marck). The death he tasted on his

tongue could be caused by the accumulation of waste products in his mouth due to the

vomiting, causing foul breath. So this could be an interesting explanation from his dead.
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However, Mozart did not suffer from anorexia which is one of the early symptoms of

uremia and also diminished mental perception in the last signs until death. The other

disease that apparently Mozart had causing his death was Henoch-Schönlein Purpura

which is an inflammation of blood vessels containing the antibody in the skin and

kidney. It is this sickness that Amadeus developed in 1984 which got worse with the

years, and it made him weak to die from pneumonia in December, 1791. However, the

problem with this sickness was that Mozart did not cover the symptoms of that illness or

he did not exhibit some of the major signs of it like purple spot on his body which

nobody told about that. Another reason is that this illness is more common in boys

younger than 21 years and he was 35 already. Also, infective endocarditis was another

illness found in Mozart’s history which is a terrible inflammation in the interior of the

heart mainly caused by a bacterial infection affecting the blood cells like white blood

cells which primary job is protect and make work your defensive immune mechanisms

as normal. This hypothesis was sustained by Amadeus’ symptoms like fever, skin

lesions, inflamed of hands, and feet until the fatal accident of his death by the disease.

However, this theory was also discarded. The last infection was rheumatic fever which

is an inflammatory disease causing heart problems without any signs, and when Mozart

got ill there was a disease in Vienna which was an epidemic. It was recognized by

physicians as rheumatic fever. Not only that, but also the symptoms that Wolfgang had

were very similar to rheumatic fever’s symptoms like fever, abdominal pain, and nose

bleeds. Not only these warning signs had proved this case, but also a Mozart’s letter in

1790 that said his head was covered with bandages due to rheumatic pains. However,

for someone who had supposedly suffered repetitive episodes of the disease, Mozart

was in perfect health, and also this illness mainly appears in children between 6 and 15
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years old. Here is where the contradiction lies for all these sicknesses. Finally, there are

still doubts about his diagnosis given by medical sources.

In brief, I strongly believe that Mozart was murdered by Salieri in some way

because there facts that make us believe that Mozart’s death was precipitated taking in

mind the way he lived his last years and clearly described in Amadeus conclusion. We

can see that in Mozart’s last words telling his wife, “Salieri…Salieri has killed

me.”(Shaffer). Antonio Salieri made Mozart to live in poverty and get crazy in his mind.

Also, his wife for that same reason of writing the Requiem left him alone because she

saw how crazy, desperate, and also ill he was getting. Its loneliness took him into the

alcohol, accelerating his death. You do not have to commit a murder to appear guilty; I

think those actions can also kill a person, his heart, and his hope. However, Mozart’s

body died he still alive in our minds, his splendid music which is recognized across the

world, his simplicity like a child, his charismatic laugh which I love, the adoration for his

son, and his love for his wife who loved him even after dead like his sister-in-law Sophie

said "I cannot possibly describe the boundless misery of his faithful wife as she threw

herself on her knees and implored succor from the Almighty for His aid. She could not

tear herself away from him, beg her as I did."(, 2009). Although some testimony said

that she did not appear in his funeral contradicting what the play and the movie

expressed. On the other hand, everybody in this world pay for what they do to other

people like Salieri got what he deserved nobody remembers his compositions, and he

died alone without a family because life and death can only be decide by God.

Moreover, like Amadeus himself said in a letter to his father on May 4, 1787; “As death,

when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed

during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of
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mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very

soothing and consoling, and I thank my God for graciously granting me the

opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true

happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that —- young as I am — I may

not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in

company I am morose or disgruntled.”(Steptoe, 1988) That is why we still asking

ourselves if was Mozart murdered, or was it disease that killed him? I think that it will

continue a mystery. I personally loved the play, and as the Washington Post said, we

will not see or experience another play like Amadeus in many years.

Works Cited

brainyquote. 2 December 2009

<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/wolfgangam392682.html>.

Marck, John T. The Life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 2 December 2009

<http://www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article1003.html>.

Shaffer, Peter. Amadeus. n.d.

Steptoe, Andrew. "The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas ." 1988.

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"The New York Times review of Amadeus."

Till, Nicholas. "Mozart and the Enlightenment, Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s
Operas:." (1992).

wikipedia. 20 October 2009. 21 November 2009

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henoch–Schönlein purpura>.

wikipedia. 16 November 2009. 21 November 2009

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatic_fever>.

Wikipedia. 28 Semptember 2009. 21 November 2009

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/uremia>.

Wikipedia. 28 november 2009. 2 december 2009

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mozart>.