Mystery of Mozart's Skull Nears Solution

The century-old mystery as to whether a skull found in an Austrian basement is that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be solved over the weekend when experts reveal the results of DNA tests.

Researchers said yesterday they would broadcast their findings on Sunday as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.

The tests were conducted by experts from Innsbruck’s institute for forensic medicine, who exhumed the remains of several of Mozart’s relatives last year from the family vault in Salzburg. They included the composer’s 16-year-old niece Jeanette and his maternal grandmother. DNA comparisons "succeeded in getting a clear result" on the skull, forensic pathologist Walther Parson told Austrian broadcaster ORF. But he refused to say whether the skull was that of the composer or someone else.

The skull has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the Austrian city where Mozart was born on January 27 1756, for more than a century. Mozart died aged 35 and was buried in Vienna in 1791 in a plot that was subsequently reused. Nobody knows what happened to his skeleton, but a gravedigger who buried the composer later recovered the skull. It was given to the foundation in 1901. In 1991 a French academic who examined the skull suggested Mozart may have died of complications from a head injury not rheumatic fever, as most historians believe.