A portrait of Mozart

Vienna, Jan. 4 (AP): Have scientists found Mozart’s skull? Researchers said yesterday they will reveal the results of DNA tests in a documentary film airing this weekend on Austrian television as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.

The tests were conducted last year by experts at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in the alpine city of Innsbruck, and the long-awaited results will be publicised in Mozart: The Search for Evidence, to be screened on Sunday by state broadcaster ORF.

Past tests were inconclusive, but this time, “we succeeded in getting a clear result”, lead researcher Dr Walther Parson, a renowned forensic pathologist, told ORF. He said the results were “100 per cent verified” by a US army laboratory.

The skull in question is one that for more than a century has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the elegant Austrian city where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756.

Parson said genetic material from scrapings from the skull was analysed and compared to DNA samples gathered in 2004 from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and a niece. The bones were recovered when a Mozart family grave was opened in 2004 at Salzburg’s Sebastian Cemetery.

Mozart died in 1791 and was buried in a pauper’s grave at Vienna’s St Mark’s Cemetery. The location of the grave was initially unknown, but its likely location was determined in 1855. The grave on that spot is adorned by a column and a sad-looking angel.

Legend has it that a gravedigger who knew which body was Mozart’s at some point sneaked the skull out of the grave. Through different channels, the skull came to the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1902, according to Dr Stephan Pauly, the foundation’s director.