Alas Poor 'Wolfy' We Know His Music Well

Once Upon A Time, A Genius Lived And Died

Yes, that fellow of infinite jest and "too many notes".
Scientists think they might have found Mozart's skull. Now they are handing it around like third rate actors, putting on their best Hamlet airs.

The results of DNA tests carried out on a skull believed to have contained the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be announced on television as part of Austria's celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday.

In a documentary entitled Mozart: The Search for Evidence, researchers will reveal the conclusions of tests carried out on the skull at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck last year. DNA from shavings from the skull was compared with genetic material from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and niece.

Until now, tests on the skull, which belongs to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, have proved inconclusive, but today Dr Walther Parson, the forensic pathologist who led the analysis said his team had "succeeded in getting a clear result".

Dr Parson said the result had been "100 percent verified" by a US Army laboratory but declined to elaborate.

The skull came into the possession of the Mozarteum in 1902, a century after Mozart's skull was reportedly removed from a communal grave at Vienna’s St Mark’s Cemetery by a sexton who feared it would be lost to bone crushers.

The skull, which is missing a lower jaw, has been the object of several analyses by pathologists and Mozart historians keen to learn the exact circumstances of his death. In 1991, a French scholar who examined it claimed that Mozart may have died of complications of a head injury rather than rheumatic fever as most historians believe.

Pierre-Francois Puech, an anthropologist from the University of Provence, said he had found a fracture on the skull’s left temple, which could help explain the severe headaches the composer was said to have suffered in the year before his death. Other more fanciful stories of the skull say that it screams and sings.

Austria has designated 2006 a Mozart jubilee year, with dozens of events to commemorate his 250 birthday. The composer died in 1791 at the age of 35.

Hmmm. It's hard to say Vienna was exactly kind to 'Wolfy' according to Peter Schaeffer's play 'Amadeus'. Now they are hoping to feast on his carrion, having lived on the legacy of his music for these many years. Kind of sad, no?

Anyway, Happy New Year and welcome to the 250th birthday year for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.