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Published: Thursday, 16 January 2025 at 11:56 AM
Mozart stories: ten of the wildest rumours about the great composer’s life and death
Did the boy Mozart transcribe Allegri’s Miserere after hearing it just once? Did Salieri poison him? And is that really his widow in an early photo? We rethink 10 Mozart myths and rumours, commonly repeated as fact…
Ten Mozart rumours explored
Rumour 1: He died in a pauper’s grave
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was buried in an unmarked ‘simple’ grave (not a communal pit), which was standard for Vienna’s middle class at that time. The poor were buried in sacks whereas Mozart probably wore a black suit. His wife Constanze and his patron Gottfried van Swieten bought his coffin.
Verdict: Not true. He was buried respectfully, if unspectacularly
Rumour 2: He had Tourette’s syndrome
In 1992 the British Medical Journal claimed that Mozart’s mannerisms and his scatological letters showed he had Tourette’s. But his bums-and-poo humour was in fact evidence of high spirits and was common in middle-class Vienna.
Verdict: No concrete evidence for it. He was just a bit spirited, that’s all
Rumour 3: He died rehearsing the Requiem
In the decades after Mozart’s death, the new Romantic ideas of composer-as-tortured-artist embroidered the story of the Requiem’s composition. But the day-of-death rehearsal with friends, and his sobbing during the Lacrimosa, is fanciful: the last sing-through happened earlier.
Verdict: Too good to be true? Alas, yes
Rumour 4: He was poisoned by his rival Salieri
As early as Dec 1791, the rumour was circulating that Antonio Salieri poisoned Mozart. Alexander Pushkin wrote a play about it and as late as 1984, the film Amadeus was made based on the idea. But Constanze didn’t think so, even though she said the dying, delirious Mozart mentioned it.
Verdict: Great story, but probably untrue
Rumour 5: He wrote his last three symphonies ‘for posterity’, not money
There’s no firm evidence Mozart heard them played. But he didn’t write them for posterity: he was a pro, not an egotist. He undoubtedly wrote them for commercial performance, but was probably stymied by Vienna’s 1788 recession.
Verdict: Nah, probably not
Rumour 6: The teenage Mozart wrote out Allegri’s Miserere after one hearing
Remembering and transcribing the layout of this formulaic piece would indeed have been within the powers of the young Mozart, one of music’s greatest prodigies. However, no Mozart manuscript of Allegri’s Miserere is known. The only references are his father Leopold’s vague letter at the time, and his sister’s recollections 20 years later.
Verdict: Enough evidence to swing it
Rumour 7: He constructed a system for generating minuets by throwing dice
A portion of his String Quintet, K516 manuscript has music fragments possibly associated with the alphabet – but no instructions on how to ‘convert’ names to melodies, and nothing about dice.
Verdict: Hard to say a conclusive yes here
Rumour 8: He wore brightly coloured wigs
Not only did Mozart never wear the party-joke hairpieces featured in the film Amadeus – he rarely wore a wig (only for official occasions). What you see in those portraits is his own fair hair, dressed and beribboned, as society men did then.
Verdict: False (but thanks Amadeus, it was a lot of fun)
Rumour 9: Listening to Mozart increases your intelligence
Rauscher, Shaw and Ky (1993) reported that hearing ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata K448 temporarily increased IQ scores, compared to silence, something that came to be known as ‘The Mozart Effect‘. But nobody else has replicated this – they’ve only concluded that it’s an effect of mood.
Verdict: Jury’s out
Rumour 10: This is the world’s only photo of his widow
An old lady seen standing in a group photo taken at the house of composer Max Keller is rumoured to be Mozart’s widow, Constanze.
Now, then. There’s some discussion over the authenticity of this photo. On the one hand, Constanze – aged just 29 when Mozart died in 1791 – did later marry Danish diplomat Georg Nissen and they regularly visited Max Keller at his home in Altoetting, southern Germany. So far, so plausible.
On the other hand, outdoor photography was still a very young art form by the time of Constanze’s death in 1842, so it would be an impressive feat to have had this photo taken in the art form’s very early infancy.
Verdict: Could be!
Words: Rob Ainsley