- Buried in an Unmarked Grave -]
Decades later Sophie Haibel the younger sister of Mozart's wife, Constanze, still vividly remembered the eerie omen. On the first Sunday of December 1791, she was in the kitchen, preparing a cup of coffee for her mother. The previous day she had gone into the city of Vienna to visit her brother-in-law, who had fallen ill, but had returned with the news that he seemed better. Now, as she waited for the coffee to brew, Sophie stared pensively into the bright flame of an oil lamp and thought of Constanze's ailing husband. Suddenly, the flame went out "as completely as if the lamp had never been burning," she later wrote. "Not a spark remained on the main wick and yet there wasn't the slightest draught - that I can swear to." Seized with a horrible premonition, she ran to her mother, who advised her to return to Mozart's house without delay.
Constanze greeted her sister's arrival with relief, saying that Mozart had spent a restless night, and begged her to stay. "Ah, dear Sophie, how glad I am that you have come," the musician said. "You must stay here tonight and see me die." With him was a young assistant named Sussmayr, to whom Mozart was giving instructions for the completion of his last composition, a Requiem Mass. A priest was summoned, then a doctor, who ordered cold compresses to be placed on the patient's fevered brow. About an hour before midnight Mozart lost consciousness; at 12:55 A.M. on December 5, 1791, he died. The former child prodigy and prolific composer was two months short of his 36th birthday.
Unfinished portrait of Mozart Always pressed for money, Mozart had been working at a feverish pace to complete important commissions through much of the year, and to his friends and family he seemed tense and exhausted from overwork. But when he took to his bed on November 20, no one suspected that it was a terminal illness. The symptoms were listed by Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Constanze's second husband, in his 1828 biography of the composer: "It began with swelling in his hands and feet and an almost total inability to move; this was followed by sudden vomiting, and this is called acute military fever." This diagnosis was confirmed in the official register of death for the city of Vienna.
Mozart himself suspected foul play. Some weeks before his death, he told Constanze that he was being poisoned: "Someone has given me aqua toffana and has calculated the precise time of my death." An odorless, slow-acting poison with an arsenic base, aqua toffana was named for Teofania de Adamo, a 17t-century Italian woman who had invented the potion and dispensed it to would-be murderers. The Requiem Mass a mysterious stranger had commissioned him to write, Mozart came to believe, was for his own funeral service.
On December 31, 1791, a Berlin newspaper reported the composer's death and speculated on the cause. "Because his body swelled up after death, people even thought he had been poisoned." In an undated memorandum, Mozart's older son, Carl Thomas, recollected that his father's body was so swollen and the stench of putrefaction so great that an autopsy was not performed. Unlike most corpses that become stiff and cold, Mozart's body remained soft and elastic, as do those who die of poisoning.
But who would have wanted Mozart dead? The widow gave little credence to the rumor of poisoning and named no suspect. And thus the tale. was soon forgotten - only to be dramatically revived three decades later by none other than the rival who well may have wished Mozart dead.
