Was the wonder of Salzburg really buried in a mass grave?

Immortalised in director Miloš Forman’s iconic film Amadeus, the legend of Mozart’s pauper burial – in which he was purportedly sewn into a linen bag and tossed into a mass grave – has long fascinated historians and musicians alike. But online blogger Michael Lorenz argues this myth may actually be just that – a myth, and one that may have simply originated from some lazy research by music historians.

Austrian ruler Joseph II played an important part in the creation of the mystery surrounding the great composer’s burial. In 1784, Emperor Joseph – a man obsessed with sanitation and apparently not too keen on the smell of death – issued the Josephinian Burial Regulations decree that sought to achieve the “quickest possible decomposition” of buried bodies. He proposed bodies “should be sewn into a linen bag, completely naked and without clothes”, placed in one mass grave and that coffins were to be made reusable, as only necessary for transporting bodies to the burial site.

Lorenz argues that music historians such as Braunbehrens, Maynard Solomon and Martin Geck got it all wrong by ceasing their investigation at this point, and of incorrectly perpetuating this singular proposition...