Mystery of Mozart Skull Deepens

VOA News ^ | 9 January 2006 | VOA News

[CurlyBill]

Mystery of Mozart Skull Deepens

By VOA News
09 January 2006

Forensic scientists say they have failed to unravel the 200-year old mystery of the skull of legendary Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Austrian television commissioned American and Austrian scientists to carry out DNA tests on a skull that some experts insist is Mozart's.

The scientists hoped to match its DNA to genetic samples taken from what they believed are the skeletons of Mozart's grandmother and niece.

The scientists said on Austrian television Sunday that the skeletons do not match the skull, and that the skeletons are also unrelated - creating a whole new mystery of who is buried the Mozart family crypt.

Mozart was buried in a Vienna pauper's cemetery in 1791. The skull was thought to have been dug up 10 years later.

[bigsigh]

If it was dug up 15 years ago and the person remembered the location in which Moz was buried, he must have been very old.

[He Rides A White Horse]

Where have you been bigsigh; haven't heard from you in a while......

[bigsigh]

after five bypasses and 7 years on the couch eating ice cream, the wife put me to work. Financial Planner, commercial developments. But JR hasn't caught me yet, so I'm here now and then. In fact, probably too often.

Best wishes!

[He Rides A White Horse]

Five bypasses?.....hope you are well.

[bigsigh]

Thanks for your wishes and concern.

[gov_bean_ counter]

From Mozart.com

He died nearly penniless and in debt, and at his death at age 35 an apathetic public took little notice of this man who had done so much in service to civilization. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave with few mourners. After his death, the bones of this great paragon of self-sacrifice for the sake of improving civilization were dug up and disposed of. His grave was then re-used, and to this day no one knows where his bones lie. Perhaps they are in a catacomb somewhere, in a huge bone-pile containing thousands of anonymous cadavers.

[Reaganesque]

As Tom Lehrer once said of Mozart:

"Mozart is the kind of person who makes you realize just how little you have accomplished in your life. For example, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for six years!"

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

Sounds like lots of skullduggery involved here!

Now ducking for cover...

[gov_bean_ counter]

Chuckle. Thanks.

[sitetest]

Dear EveningStar,

Thanks for the ping!

Classical Music Ping List ping!

Let's hear it for Amadeus' skull in the month of the 250th anniversary of his birth!

If you'd like on or off this list, let me know via FR e-mail.

Thanks!


sitetest

[pillut48]

http://tinyurl.com/ak8dx

"REALISTIC GRINNING SKULL SPOOKY HUMAN BONE SKELETON NEW
Item number: 5652394107"

GMTA? ;-)

[wideminded]

If it was dug up 15 years ago and the person remembered the location in which Moz was buried, he must have been very old.

The claim is that the skull was dug up not long after Mozart's death. It was donated to a foundation in Salzburg in 1901. I saw a picture of it about 15 years ago. This article says that a forensic pathologist who examined the skull thinks that it belonged to a woman.

[beaver fever]

I used to work with a guy who was a gardener and grave digger at the local cemetary. The grave sites had multiple graves piled one on top of each other.

They used a backhoe to get down to the casket and then he would finish digging by hand.

He occasionally found a bone and took it home to feed it to his dog.

ISYN the world is a strange place and you can't trust a grave digger. The job makes you a little bent.

[wideminded]

"In 1801 the St. Marx' Cemetery Trust had the third class plot in which Mozart and 15 to 20 others were buried retrenched, which was an automatic procedure every 10 years to enable graves to be reused. The cemetery, which opened in 1784, only had room for 7.000 graves and space was always at a premium. Wealthy residents bones were cleaned and placed in a charnel house with their names painted on the skull whereas the bones of the poorer folk were exhumed and crushed, reinterred in the Vienna Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) or disposed of in some other way. Mozart's grave was reopened by Joseph Rothmayer, the same grave digger/sexton who had buried him a decade earlier. Rothmayer said he knew before the burial what Mozart's ultimate fate would be so had tied wire around his corpse neck to enable him to distinguish the remains from the others, knowing the exact location of the body he sought it out and saved the skull from the bone crusher. "Joseph Rothmayer gave it to friend Joseph Radschopf, who in turn gave it to his friend Jacob Hyrtl in 1842. When Hyrtl died in 1868, his brother Joseph inherited the skull. Joseph was a Viennese phrenologist. Upon his death, Joseph's wife held onto to the skull until her death in 1901. It was then bequeathed to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg. In 1902 until the 1955, the skull was placed on public view in the Foundation's Museum". [1] Where it remains today, although no longer on public display ..." - link

[beaver fever]

Here's a good one for you.

After the Brits took Egypt away from Napoleon, mummies were so plentiful that they were imported to England as fertilizer.

Walk Like an Egyptian? Try Bag 0' Egyptian.

Man the world is a strange place. Martians would make it normal.

[1rudeboy]

I'll bet a samll amount of money that Mozart's skull overlooks the bar at some fraternity house in Vienna.

[devolve]

[Xenalyte]

"Night after night I sat right next to the Emperor of Austria, playing duets with him, correcting the royal sight-reading. Tell me, if you had been me, wouldn't you have thought God had accepted your vow? And believe me, I honoured it. I was a model of virtue. I kept my hands off women, worked hours every day teaching students, many of them for free, sitting on endless committees to help poor musicians - work and work and work, that was all my life. And it was wonderful! Everybody liked me. I liked myself. I was the most successful musician in Vienna. And the happiest. Till he came. Mozart."

[Borges]

I notice your quote is from the inferior 'Director's Cut' of Amadeus. The original was perfect and did not need improvement!

[Xenalyte]

Truth be told, I couldn't remember the quotation and had to look it up online. It's been WAY too long since I saw it!

The only problem I have with "Amadeus" is that when I see Tom Hulce, I automatically think of Pinto.