Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
According to an interesting article published in the mid-1990s in the Hong Kong Med-
ical Journal , even Mozart himself in his final year believed he had been poisoned, saying
one day on a walk through a park with his wife that someone had slipped him aqua
tofana. This happens to be a slow-acting concoction of arsenic and lead that was com-
monly used in Italy at the time. The same year, when an anonymous wealthy nobleman
asked Mozart to compose a requiem, Mozart was convinced he had been commissioned
by the devil to write one for his own Requiem Mass. The day of reckoning came. On
New Year's Eve in 1791, Mozart died (the exact cause of death is unknown), causing the
plot to thicken. One German newspaper remarked casually in an article on Mozart's de-
mise that some people thought the great composer had been poisoned.
End of story for the time being. Then, some time in the 1820s, according to the Hong
Kong Medical Journal article, a senile and crumbling Salieri allegedly confessed that he
had poisoned Mozart. A couple of years later, he swore to someone else that he hadn't.
By this time, though, Salieri was ready to shuffle off this mortal coil, having become a
crumbling old man with dementia. The hapless Salieri only poured more fuel onto the
fires of conspiracy when he sought to hasten his shuffle in an attempted suicide. This, the
conspiracy theorists cried, was due to his being wracked by guilt.
Salieri died in 1825. Now the plot shifts to Russia. The Russian poet and playwright
Alexander Pushkin wrote the original play Mozart and Salieri in 1830. The Russian con-
nection grew stronger when Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov created a short opera out of this.
About 150 years later the British dramatist Peter Schaffer, inspired by Pushkin, penned
his Amadeus , and this created the basis for the screenplay of Miloš Formann's film. The
rumours had come a long way.
Innovative composer Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) stretched tonal conventions to snapping point with
his 12-tone style of composition. The most influential of his pupils were Alban Berg (1885-1935) and
Anton von Webern (1883-1945); both were born in Vienna and both continued the development of
Schönberg's technique.
Vormärz & Revolutionary Eras
The epoch of Wiener Klassik was losing momentum in 19th-century Vienna and, with
Mozart, Salieri, Haydn, Beethoven and the other great proponents dead or dying off,
Austrian society and Europe as a whole experienced a period of repressive conservatism
that culminated in revolutions across the continent in 1848 aimed at liberal reform. The
prerevolutionary period was known as the Vormärz ('Pre-March' - the revolutions began
 
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