Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prominent classical composer who did not surrendered to the demands and values of his time to try to autonomously consolidate his musical career. Throughout his career, he managed to face the two faces of a musical career when he was acclaimed for the genius of some works and forgotten by the aesthetic and moral conservatism of his time. This dubiousness accompanied Mozart throughout his life and also ended up marking the event of his death.
In the year 1791, Sophie Haibel, Mozart's younger sister-in-law, had spent some time in the company of the musician due to an illness supposedly overcome. Some time later, according to his memoir, he had a new memory of Mozart while he was preparing coffee for his mother, in the first week of December 1791. At that moment, he felt an intriguing omen:the moment he remembered Mozart, the flame of a lamp suddenly went out.
Frightened by what had happened, Sophie went to her sister's house to get some news about Mozart's health. Constanze, the composer's wife, had warned that Mozart had been quite restless since the night before. Bedridden, the composer asked Sophie to stay at his house so she could watch her own death. The strange request motivated the family to turn to the services of a doctor and a priest.
Seeming to know the end of his own existence, Mozart died in the early hours of December 5, 1791. From then on, the causes of his death were shrouded in mystery. Initially, some came to believe that a stress crisis could have shaken Mozart's physical integrity. The musician's endless financial problems would have forced him to accept a load of commissions that put him in a maddening pace of work.
In a first work on the life of Mozart, it is reported that the disease that afflicted him had developed gradually. Nausea, difficulty moving the feet and hands would have been the first symptoms of a crisis of acute military fever, a disease that was recorded as its official cause of death. However, less than a month after his death, a Berlin newspaper raised the suspicion that Mozart had been murdered.
Carl Thomas, son of Mozart, had reported that his father's body was so swollen and fetid that it was impossible to perform a more detailed autopsy. In this way, the extremely altered conditions of the corpse raised the hypothesis that Mozart would have been a victim of poisoning. Among other suspects were Antonio Salieri, one of Mozart's greatest artistic rivals, and the Masonic Order that would have part of its secrets revealed in the song "The Magic Flute", composed by Mozart in 1791.