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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.
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