Did Salieri poison Mozart?

The claim, and the verdict

The claim: Antonio Salieri, the Habsburg court composer, was so jealous of Mozart's genius that he poisoned him, and confessed to it before his own death.

The verdict: false. No source from 1791 accuses Salieri. The doctors who treated Mozart and the official death record describe an illness, and none of them suspected poison. The rumour appeared 32 years later, attached to a sick old man, and Salieri denied it. Modern historians agree that Salieri and Mozart were professional rivals at times, but also colleagues who worked together and spoke well of each other's music.

How Mozart died in 1791

In the autumn of 1791 Mozart was busy and, by his standards, doing well. The Magic Flute opened in Vienna on 30 September and drew full houses, and he was writing the Requiem commissioned by an anonymous patron. Around 20 November he fell ill with fever, painful swelling of his hands and feet, and vomiting. He died just before one in the morning on 5 December 1791, aged 35. The parish register gave the cause as “hitziges Frieselfieber”, severe miliary fever, a description of symptoms rather than a diagnosis.

Doctors and historians have proposed more than a hundred causes since. Leading candidates are rheumatic fever and a streptococcal infection leading to kidney failure. A 2009 study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine by Richard Zegers, Andreas Weigl and Andrew Steptoe compared Vienna's death records for the winter of 1791 and found a rise in deaths with swelling among young men, consistent with a local epidemic of that kind. None of this can be proved now, because Mozart's body was buried in a shared grave at St Marx cemetery, as Vienna's rules then required, and its exact place is unknown.

What the evidence shows: a dated source table

Two points matter most. First, the only person who spoke of poison in 1791 was Mozart himself, ill and frightened, and he named nobody. Second, the 1823 “confession” came from a man in his seventies who had suffered a mental and physical breakdown, and it reached the public only as hearsay. Beethoven's conversation books, in which visitors wrote because he could not hear, show the rumour being passed around Vienna, not proved.

How the rumour became a legend

Mozart's death young, in debt, with the Requiem unfinished and a mysterious patron behind it, was already the stuff of legend in the 1790s. (The patron turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted to pass the Requiem off as his own work for his late wife.) Salieri, by contrast, was a successful Italian court official, which made him an easy villain for writers who liked to set German genius against Italian fashion.

Pushkin's play gave the story its shape: envy, a dinner, a glass of wine. It is a meditation on talent and jealousy, not a work of history, and Pushkin did not claim it was. Shaffer took the same idea for Amadeus, and he too was clear that his Salieri was invented. But the film reached tens of millions of people, and for many of them it is the only thing they know about either composer.

What Mozart and Salieri actually said and did

Mozart's letters show a sharp tongue about rivals. In the early 1780s he complained to his father Leopold that Italian musicians at court were scheming against him, and Salieri was among them. That rivalry was real: Salieri held the court posts Mozart wanted.

By the end of Mozart's life, though, the relationship looks friendly enough. In his letter to Constanze of 14 October 1791 Mozart describes driving Salieri and the singer Caterina Cavalieri to The Magic Flute, and says Salieri listened with great attention and called out his praise from the overture to the last chorus. After Mozart's death Salieri taught his younger son, Franz Xaver Mozart. His other pupils included Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt.

Mozart himself wrote calmly about death. In a letter of 4 April 1787 to his dying father he said he had come to see death as the true goal of life and a consoling friend rather than something terrifying. You can ask him about Salieri, Vienna and his last months by talking with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Yuga. It is an AI recreation built from his letters and the record, not Mozart, and it can be wrong, so cite the letters in your work.

How to check a murder legend

1. Find the earliest accusation and measure the gap. Here, 32 years.
2. Read the medical record of the time, even if its language is old fashioned.
3. Ask whether the accused had a chance to answer, and what he said.
4. Separate a work of art from a work of history. Pushkin and Shaffer wrote drama.

More on the music: Mozart and Beethoven compared, famous classical composers and questions to ask Mozart. For the general method, see how to check if a quote is real.