Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the early hours of December 5, 1791, in his Vienna apartment, felled by an illness that struck suddenly weeks earlier. He was 35. His Requiem Mass in D minor, commissioned anonymously, remained incomplete, finished later by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Rumors of poisoning circulated for decades, though most historians attribute his death to rheumatic fever or a related infection.
Mozart had been bedridden for two weeks, his body swollen, his mind reportedly still composing even as his strength failed. Constanze, his wife, later recalled that in his final hours he tried to hum the timpani part of the Requiem's Lacrimosa to his brother-in-law, wanting to demonstrate how it should sound. He never finished the phrase.
He was buried in a common grave at St. Marx Cemetery outside Vienna, a customary practice for the middle class at the time rather than a sign of poverty or disgrace, though the myth of a pauper's burial persisted for generations. No mourners accompanied the coffin to the graveside, partly due to a snowstorm, which only deepened the legend.
The unfinished Requiem became one of music's great mysteries and monuments. Süssmayr completed the orchestration from Mozart's sketches and verbal instructions, and the work premiered in fragments even before Mozart's death was a year old. Salieri, his supposed rival, conducted portions of it in tribute — a detail that complicates the poisoning legend Hollywood later popularized in Amadeus.