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The Case of the Dead Composer: Did Tainted Pork Fell Mozart?

By Neil Osterweil
WebMD Health News

June 12, 2001 -- I was working the day shift out of Medical News when the boss dumped an unsolved case in my lap -- this was one was so cold you could chill martinis with it. A musician named Wolfgang A. Mozart bought the farm in '91 -- 1791, that is. Word on the street back then was that he was done in by a rival composer named Antonio Salieri. Sources claimed Salieri didn't like this hotshot kid muscling in on his territory, so he slipped the 36-year-old Mozart some arsenic. They even made a play and a movie about it, called Amadeus.

Today the notion that some goombah put a hit on Mozart doesn't hold much water with historians. But if Tony "The Composer" Salieri didn't have a contract out on Mozart, who did? Two C-notes' worth of years have passed since then, and there have been 101 theories about the boy genius' untimely end: rheumatic fever, overdose of mercury (a self-administered treatment for syphilis), kidney disease, you name it.

But still there was no smoking gun, and there probably never will be, because someone destroyed the evidence. Like most regular guys in his day, Mozart had a no-frills send-off and was planted in an unmarked grave. Somebody dug him up seven years later, scattered the bones, and that was all she wrote. No stiff, no clues. They say that dead men tell no tales -- especially when you don't habeas corpus.

There's no hard evidence to show that Wolfie was poisoned, and every medical theory that's been put out there has a hole in it big enough to drive a Buick through, say critics. But don't underestimate medical types. Seems there's a guy in Seattle -- a rookie -- who thinks he's got it all figured out. It wasn't arsenic that did Mozart in, says Jan A. Hirschmann, MD -- it was pork chops. It's all there in black and white in the June 11 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

"I was asked to look into it by a colleague of mine in medicine who was interested in Mozart, had read about his death and found various theories that had been proposed before unconvincing. I didn't actually have any information about it beforehand. I didn't know much about Mozart's life -- or death for that matter. It sounded like a challenge to me as an infectious disease specialist," says Hirschmann, who's with the Puget Sound Veterans Affairs Medical Center, in an interrogation by WebMD.

He reviews the facts: Mozart played his swan song 15 days after getting sick with a fever, rash, swelling of tissues (but with no breathing trouble), and inflammation of the extremities (including hands and feet). The composer kept his head about him right to the end, suggesting that whatever it was, it wasn't mercury poisoning, which can really do a number on the brain. The disease had also been making the rounds in a local epidemic in Vienna, Austria, had caused a lot of deaths, and ran a predictable course

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