Vienna – Have scientists found Mozart’s skull? Researchers said Tuesday that they’ll reveal the results of DNA tests in a documentary airing Sunday on Austrian TV as part of a year of events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.
The tests were done last year by experts at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, and the results will be made public in “Mozart: The Search for Evidence,” to be screened by state broadcaster ORF.
Past tests were inconclusive, but this time, “we succeeded in getting a clear result,” Dr. Wal ther Parson, a forensic pathologist and the lead researcher, told ORF. He said the results were “100 percent verified” by a U.S. Army laboratory.
For more than a century, the skull has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the elegant Austrian city where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on Jan. 27, 1756.
Parson said genetic material from scrapings from the skull was analyzed and compared to DNA samples gathered in 2004 from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and a niece. The bones were recovered when a family grave that was opened in 2004 at Salzburg’s Sebastian Cemetery.
Mozart died in 1791 at 35 and was buried in a common grave at Vienna’s St. Mark’s Cemetery. The location of the grave was initially unknown, but its likely location was determined in 1855.
The grave now is adorned by a column and a sad-looking angel.
Legend has it that a gravedigger who knew which body was Mozart’s sneaked the skull out of the grave. The skull – which is missing its lower jaw – came to the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1902, according to Dr. Stephan Pauly, the foundation’s director.
In 1991, a French scholar who examined the skull came to the the unconfirmed conclusion that Mozart may have died of complications of a head injury rather than rheumatic fever as most historians believe.
