8/7/2019 Who Killed Mozart? - An author note from Scott Mariani

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8/7/2019 Who Killed Mozart? - An author note from Scott Mariani

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scot t   mar ian i

a kPublished by Simon & Schuster

New York London Toronto Sydney

  the

mozart consp iracy  

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TouchstoneA Division o Simon & Schuster, Inc.1230 Avenue o the AmericsNew Yor, NY 10020

is boo is wor o fction. Nmes, chrcters, plces, nd incidents either re products

o the uthor’s imgintion or re used fctitiously. Any resemblnce to ctul eventsor locles or persons, living or ded, is entirely coincidentl.

Copyright © 2008 by Scott Mrini

Originlly published in Gret Britin in 2008 by Avon, division o HrperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this boo or portions thereo in nyorm whtsoever. For inormtion ddress Touchstone Subsidiry Rights Deprtment,1230 Avenue o the Americs, New Yor, NY 10020.

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Librry o Congress Ctloging-in-Publiction DtMrini, Scott.

e Mozrt conspircy : thriller / Scott Mrini.p. cm.

1. Musicins—Crimes ginst—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigtion—Fiction.3. Mozrt, Wolgng Amdeus, 1756–1791—Deth nd buril—Fiction. 4. Secret

societies—Fiction. 5. Humn scrifce—Fiction. I. Title.PR6113.A745M69 2011823'.92—dc22

2010025233ISBN 978-1-4391-9336-5ISBN 978-1-4391-9338-9 (eboo)

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Author’s Note

Having trained as a classical pianist and having had a deep interest

in music all my lie, I have always been intrigued by the story o Mo-

zart and thought that the mysterious circumstances surrounding hisdeath would make a great basis or a novel.

Over the last two hundred years there has been much speculation as

to what might have actually killed Mozart. e ocial, and apparently

cast-iron, medical view is that he died o acute rheumatic ever, and

that there is “no basis whatsoever” to the idea that he was poisoned.Case closed? I don’t think so.

In act, it takes only a little probing beneath the surace to reveal

that this version o events is ar rom conclusive. Over the years,dierent medical hypotheses have varied wildly. e act alone that

medical records rom the time were so sketchy makes it very hard tosupport the sweeping statement that “Mozart could not have been

poisoned.” e act is, nobody can make such a claim.

Modern medical experts conveniently overlook Mozart’s own

conviction that he had been given “aqua tofana.” is was a blend o 

three lethal poisons—arsenic, belladonna (deadly nightshade), andlead. e colorless, tasteless, and water-soluble ormula gets its name

rom the inamous seventeenth-century Italian poisoner Giulia To-

ana, who sold it to women ostensibly as a beauty treatment but also

as a neat means o liberating themselves rom unhappy marriages by

dosing their husbands with it.e symptoms o Mozart’s atal illness included painul joint

swellings in his hands and eet, terrible stomach pain and colic, renalailure, vomiting, and skin rashes. He also suered rom mental

symptoms such as personality change, paranoid delusions and hallu-

cinations, obsessive preoccupation with death, and severe depression.

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336 | autho r ' s no te

Loosely speaking, these symptoms could point to a diagnosis o rheu-

matic ever, streptococcal inection, or any o the other conditions

that doctors have proposed.

But they also match with uncanny precision the collective toxiceects o  aqua tofana’s three deadly ingredients: hallucinations and

delusions, extreme worry and agitation, an obsession with death,

depression and personality change, violent stomach pains and colic,

renal ailure, painul swelling o joints and extremities, skin rashes,

and so on. Small doses, given over time, could bring about exactly thekind o lingering death that Mozart suered. e composer himsel 

believed he was being poisoned up to six months beore his death—hardly consistent with an acute illness that would have run its lethal

course within days. His son Carl omas Mozart also later claimed

that his ather had been deliberately poisoned.Nobody will ever know the truth or sure. But I leave it to you to

speculate. . . .

I there are reasonable grounds to suppose that Mozart might

have been poisoned, who should we be pointing the fnger at? epopular theory expounded in Peter Shaer’s play and hit movieAmadeus is that Mozart may have been poisoned by rival composer

Salieri. e notion that Salieri poisoned Mozart was around long

beore Amadeus, however—Pushkin composed poetry about it, and

Rimsky-Korsakov even wrote an opera on the subject, called Mozart

and Salieri.

So did he do it? Nobody can be certain that he didn’t; however, thehistorical act is that although the mentally ill Salieri later conessed

to the crime, he was never punished or it and changed his testimony

so oten that nobody took his conession seriously.

Another popular theory, as Leigh Llewellyn tells Ben Hope in thebook, is that Mozart might have been murdered by the Freemasons

or giving away Masonic secrets in his opera Te Magic Flute. How-

ever—as Proessor Arno tells us later in the story—this is inconsis-tent with the act that Mozart was a star o the Masonic movement,

a major public relations fgure or Freemasonry at a time when it was

coming under political fre.

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 au thor ' s not e | 337

Te Mozart Conspiracy is only a story. But as I was researching

the historical background I became increasingly convinced that more

sinister and ar-reaching political orces could potentially have been

involved in the composer’s demise. It is a act that Freemasonry’sstrong associations with the revolutionary movements taking place

in France and America in the late eighteenth century were a source o 

great concern to aristocratic rulers across Europe. It is also a act that

the Viennese secret police were under Imperial instruction to spy on,

and ultimately eradicate, the Masons. As a rising celebrity very muchin the public eye and openly championing the pro-revolutionary ide-

ology o Masonry, it is perectly easible that Mozart would have beentargeted as a major threat.

It’s only a story. Did it really happen this way? Again, I leave it up

to the reader to decide.I know what I think.

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