Mozart Was Never Buried in a Pauper's Grave, and the Poison Story Started With Him

The two things everybody knows about Mozart's death are both wrong, and the Vienna records have said so the whole time. There were no mass graves in the city in the 1790s. The common grave in the paperwork means an individual, unmarked plot for an ordinary citizen, one the city could reopen after about ten years. Mozart received a third-class funeral, the commonest kind in Vienna, paid for by his wife Constanze and his patron Baron van Swieten. A real pauper's burial was a separate, fee-free category he never had. The linen-sack law everyone pictures was revoked in January 1785 and never took effect in Vienna, and the blizzard that supposedly drove his mourners away is contradicted by a diarist and by the city observatory: mild, misty, a weak east wind. The poisoning is stranger. The first person on record saying Mozart had been poisoned was Mozart, on a drive in the Prater in his last months, according to Constanze's account. Salieri's name only appears in the days and weeks after the funeral. The real Salieri revived The Marriage of Figaro when he took over as imperial Kapellmeister, conducted the premiere of the Fortieth Symphony, co-wrote a cantata with Mozart, and taught his younger son after he died. In between: the archbishop's steward who ended Mozart's Salzburg career with a kick up the backside, the Christmas Eve piano duel with Clementi, the wedding that beat his father's consent by one day, the quartets Haydn heard, the 320 surviving sketches that demolish the no-revisions legend, the court judgment for 1,435 florins three weeks before he died, and the count who put his own name on the Requiem and conducted it as his own work in 1793. #Mozart #History #ClassicalMusic #Vienna #Documentary