The Events Surrounding the Death of Mozart

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

6-7:15pm Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Eugene Myers, MD

Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Chair, Otolaryngology, Dental Medicine, & OMFS, University of Pittsburgh

AND President of Pittsburgh Festival Opera

This is the link with the recording of the Zoom live-stream, 

including the business meeting and the Q&A session.

This is the link purely to Dr. Myers' lecture, 

complete with musical soundtrack.

Following the untimely death of the famous Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 35 (1756-1791), doctors have been obsessed with determining what caused his death. At last count there were 130 postmortem diagnoses in the medical literature. A week after Mozart's death, a Berlin newspaper falsely reported that he had been poisoned. This notion that Antonio Salieri (1750-1835), the Court composer, was jealous of Mozart's superior musical output and poisoned him was further promoted by the wonderful movie Amadeus (1984).* My lecture will recount a bit of Mozart's life and include excerpts of his music played by pianist Michael Hammer, but the primary focus will be about the events surrounding his death. I hope will absolve Salieri of poisoning Mozart.

This lecture is free and open to public. Please email cfreynoldsmhs@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link. Donations toward the speaker's honorarium are gratefully appreciated.

* The movie is based on a play by Peter Shaffer (1979), which is based on an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1897), which is based on a play by Alexander Pushkin (1830).

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its generous support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.