the

moz ar t
conspir acy

scot t mariani

a touchstone book
Published by Simon & Schuster
New York  London  Toronto  Sydney

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 Touchstone
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Scott Mariani
Originally published in Great Britain in 2008 by Avon, a division of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
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First Touchstone hardcover edition March 2011
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10 ​ ​9 ​ ​8 ​ ​7 ​ ​6 ​ ​5 ​ ​4 ​ ​3 ​ ​2 ​ ​1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mariani, Scott.
  The Mozart conspiracy : a thriller / Scott Mariani.
    p.  cm.
  1. Musicians—Crimes against—Fiction.  2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756–1791—Death and burial—Fiction.  4. Secret
societies—Fiction.  5. Human sacrifice—Fiction.  I. Title.
  PR6113.A745M69 2011
  823'.92—dc22
 2010025233
ISBN 978-1-4391-9336-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-9338-9 (ebook)

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 Author’s Note

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

in music all my life, I have always been intrigued by the story of Mo-
zart and thought that the mysterious circumstances surrounding his
death would make a great basis for a novel.
Over the last two hundred years there has been much speculation as
to what might have actually killed Mozart. The official, and apparently
cast-iron, medical view is that he died of acute rheumatic fever, and
that there is “no basis whatsoever” to the idea that he was poisoned.
Case closed? I don’t think so.
In fact, it takes only a little probing beneath the surface to reveal
that this version of events is far from conclusive. Over the years,
different medical hypotheses have varied wildly. The fact alone that
medical records from the time were so sketchy makes it very hard to
support the sweeping statement that “Mozart could not have been
poisoned.” The fact is, nobody can make such a claim.
Modern medical experts conveniently overlook Mozart’s own
conviction that he had been given “aqua toffana.” This was a blend of
three lethal poisons—arsenic, belladonna (deadly nightshade), and
lead. The colorless, tasteless, and water-soluble formula gets its name
from the infamous seventeenth-century Italian poisoner Giulia Tof-
fana, who sold it to women ostensibly as a beauty treatment but also
as a neat means of liberating themselves from unhappy marriages by
dosing their husbands with it.
The symptoms of Mozart’s fatal illness included painful joint
swellings in his hands and feet, terrible stomach pain and colic, renal
failure, vomiting, and skin rashes. He also suffered from mental
symptoms such as personality change, paranoid delusions and hallu-
cinations, obsessive preoccupation with death, and severe depression.

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 336  |  a u t h o r ' s note

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

matic fever, streptococcal infection, or any of the other conditions
that doctors have proposed.
But they also match with uncanny precision the collective toxic
effects of aqua toffana’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 failure, painful swelling of joints and extremities, skin rashes,
and so on. Small doses, given over time, could bring about exactly the
kind of lingering death that Mozart suffered. The composer himself
believed he was being poisoned up to six months before his death—
hardly consistent with an acute illness that would have run its lethal
course within days. His son Carl Thomas Mozart also later claimed
that his father had been deliberately poisoned.
Nobody will ever know the truth for sure. But I leave it to you to
speculate. . . .
If there are reasonable grounds to suppose that Mozart might
have been poisoned, who should we be pointing the finger at? The
popular theory expounded in Peter Shaffer’s play and hit movie
Amadeus is that Mozart may have been poisoned by rival composer
Salieri. The notion that Salieri poisoned Mozart was around long
before 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, the
historical fact is that although the mentally ill Salieri later confessed
to the crime, he was never punished for it and changed his testimony
so often that nobody took his confession seriously.
Another popular theory, as Leigh Llewellyn tells Ben Hope in the
book, is that Mozart might have been murdered by the Freemasons
for giving away Masonic secrets in his opera The Magic Flute. How-
ever—as Professor Arno tells us later in the story—this is inconsis-
tent with the fact that Mozart was a star of the Masonic movement,
a major public relations figure for Freemasonry at a time when it was
coming under political fire.

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 a u t h o r ' s n o t e   |  337

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

the historical background I became increasingly convinced that more
sinister and far-reaching political forces could potentially have been
involved in the composer’s demise. It is a fact that Freemasonry’s
strong associations with the revolutionary movements taking place
in France and America in the late eighteenth century were a source of
great concern to aristocratic rulers across Europe. It is also a fact that
the Viennese secret police were under Imperial instruction to spy on,
and ultimately eradicate, the Masons. As a rising celebrity very much
in the public eye and openly championing the pro-revolutionary ide-
ology of Masonry, it is perfectly feasible that Mozart would have been
targeted 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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