It is being reported this morning by the Reuters News Service that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died due to the complications stemming from strep throat. According to a Dutch study group, the death of the composer in 1791 at the young age of 35 was not from intentional poisoning, as previously report… 218 years ago.

The study shows that in earlier reports, Antonia Salieri attempted to murder Mozart with poison, when he accused Salieri of plagiarism. As Mozart's music became more popular over the decades and Salieri's music was forgotten, Mozart's unsubstantiated allegations gained credence and tarnished Salieri's reputation. Mozart's suspicions of Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of the Princess of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead, and the following year Mozart was not selected to be the Princess's piano teacher either.

On his death certificate it was officially recorded that the cause of his death was hitziges Frieselfieber, or "heated miliary fever," referring to a rash that looks like millet seeds, also know today as Scarlet Fever. But his death, on Dec. 5, 1791, is thought to have resulted from rheumatic fever, a disease which he had suffered from repeatedly through his life. After a cheap funeral at Saint Stephen's Cathedral, he was buried in an unmarked grave at the cemetery of Saint Marx, a Viennese suburb.

"Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that developed a deadly kidney complication," researcher Richard Zegers, of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Amy Norton from Reuters Health. Zegers and his colleagues said this "minor epidemic" of step throat, may have begun in the city's military hospital.

As a composer, Mozart wrote more than 600 works during his life, eventually developed severe swelling, "malaise," back pain and a rash, consistent with a strep infection leading to kidney inflammation known as glomerulonephritis.

Mozart excelled in every form in which he composed. His contemporaries found the restless ambivalence and complicated emotional content of his music difficult to understand. Accustomed to the light, superficial style of rococo music, his aristocratic audiences could not accept the music's complexity and depth. Yet, with Josef Haydn, Mozart perfected the grand forms of symphony, opera, string quartet, and concerto that marked the classical period in music. In his operas Mozart's uncanny psychological insight is unique in musical history. His music informed the work of the later Haydn and of the next generation of composers, most notably Beethoven. The brilliance of his work continued until the end, although darker themes of poignancy and isolation grew more marked in his last years, and his compositions continue to exert a particular fascination for musicians and music lovers.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 21 - Andante