| S Picture
        Gallery   |  | Death
 At his death
        from a feverish illness whose precise nature has given rise to much
        speculation (he was not poisoned), he left unfinished the Requiem,
        his first large-scale work for the church since the c Minor Mass of
        1783, also unfinished; a completion by his pupil Süssmayr was long
        accepted as the standard one but there have been recent attempts to
        improve on it. Mozart was buried in a Vienna suburb, with little
        ceremony and in an unmarked grave, in accordance with prevailing custom. Mozart may have
        died of a number of illnesses. The official diagnosis was miliary fever,
        but the truth is that the physicians who attended him were never quite
        sure what Mozart died of. He suffered from rheumatic pain, headaches,
        toothaches, skin eruptions, and lethargy. A common theory today is that
        Mozart died of uremia following chronic kidney disease. Another
        possibility is rheumatic fever. Regardless of the cause, Mozart became
        bedridden for the last two weeks of his life. He died at shortly after
        midnight on December 5th, 1791, aged thirty-five years, eleven months,
        and nine days. <Previous                                                                  
        Return To Biography   |