[Dixielandjazz] Happy 250th W.A. Mozart. Is that skull really you?

[Steve barbone]

CAVREAT - LONG - Not OKOM for all of us. But surely of interest to Dr. Fred
Spencer and some other list mates.

Has anyone heard if the skull was indeed Mozart's?

Cheers,
Steve


A Head for Music - NY TIMES - By RICHARD POWERS - January 8, 2006

MOZART'S skull may or may not have been rediscovered, and you probably
didn't even know it was missing.

Today, live on Austrian state television, scientists from the Institute for
Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck will declare definitively whether the skull
held by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in fact belonged
to the man whom many consider the most sublime composer who ever lived. In
what reads like a pilot for a new spinoff - "CSI: Tyrol" - forensic
pathologists, employing the highest of high biotech, compared genetic
material scraped from the mystery Schädel with DNA gathered from the thigh
bones of Mozart's grandmother and niece.

The results, determined last year and "100 percent verified" by a United
States Army laboratory, have been held secret for the broadcast of the
documentary "Mozart: The Search for Evidence" on this first weekend in the
250th year of Mozart's birth. After a quarter of a millennium, the bones of
a man pitched into a common grave are suddenly world news.

Doctors, chemists and forensic pathologists have been prodding at the skull
since it was acquired by the Mozarteum more than a century ago, hoping to
shed light on the composer's mysterious last illness and death. The skull
has come to embody the flurry of myths that swirl around this most
inexplicable of humans. In every decade, researchers have vied for the last
word about the man's death: rheumatic fever, Henoch-Schönlein syndrome,
manic depression, infectious disease aggravated by bad medical treatment, a
hematoma caused by a fall or blow to the head or even (the perennial popular
favorite) murder. 

These investigators have probed the skull as if its evidence might render
Mozart's mind-boggling musical ability more understandable and thus less
disturbing. That the skull exists separately from the skeleton at all is
testimony to the 19th-century cutting-edge science of phrenology, and the
habit among budding phrenologists of going about collecting the heads of
geniuses.

This story follows another of a month ago, when researchers at the Energy
Department's Argonne National Laboratory announced "solid evidence" that
Beethoven suffered from lead poisoning. Fragments of Beethoven's skull
(confirmed, of course, by mitochondrial DNA comparison with Beethoven's
hair) were scanned by X-rays from the lab's Advanced Photon Source, which,
according to a press release, "provides the most brilliant X-rays in the
Western Hemisphere." (A test of such importance is clearly not to be
outsourced.)

The test revealed large samples of lead concentration in Beethoven's bone
sample, relative to a control. The Argonne team hinted tantalizingly that
the accumulation of lead might account for the change in Beethoven's
personality and music from his early 20's onward. Jay Leno's take:
"Hopefully, the Beethoven family now finally has some closure."

Diagnosing art's unsolved mysteries with state-of-the-art medical knowledge
is irresistible. The speculations arise in every season: Oscar Wilde's skin
condition resulted from hair dyes; Van Gogh suffered from xanthopsia induced
by digitalis; Dostoyevsky owed his visionary power to epilepsy; Pick's
disease produced Ravel's "Bolero"; the Mona Lisa's unusual facial
musculature came from Bell's palsy. But our present obsession with science's
ability to solve crimes and put ancient mysteries to rest has become
epidemic.

Three of the country's top 10 television shows feature forensic
pathologists, and forensic science has become one of the hot undergraduate
degrees. We are fed a steady diet of sensational, horrific, aura-filled,
definitive revelations about unsolved mysteries that only our latest
technologies can provide. We have always wanted to speak with the dead, and
now we have more and better tools for listening than ever.

Small wonder, then, that the DNA analysis of Mozart's putative skull has
captured international imaginations. No doubt many in the audience for
"Mozart: The Search for Evidence" will hope that if the skull indeed turns
out to be Mozart's, the Europeans will clone him before the South Koreans
do. Others will hope that another of our old secular relics, placed under
our ever-improving scopes, might tell us where our culture came from, even
as the audience for that culture vanishes into a sea of crime investigation
shows.

For my part, I am hoping that cutting-edge molecular biology will tell us
that the Mozarteum's skull bears no relation at all to Mozart's grandmother
and niece, that the cranium belonged, with 100 percent certainty, to no one
in particular - to some other member of that old common grave. Even if DNA
analysis does succeed in confirming the skull's identity, it will lay to
rest exactly zero of the mysteries still surrounding Mozart. Nor will any
future advances in science ever put to rest the unsolved Mozart, the
inexplicable genius, that most troubles and transforms us.

If you are really looking for messages from beyond the grave, for a
connection with the hidden past, or for sensational, horrific, aura-filled
revelations of life and death, you could do worse than listen to the
Commendatore's words, in "Don Giovanni," when he comes back to tell the Don
truths neither confirmed nor yet disproved by medical science:

Non si pasce di cibo mortale
Chi si pasce di cibo celeste

Those who partake of heavenly food do not need the mortal stuff. What can
the bones know that the notes don't? Forget the forensics and face the
music. The mysteries hidden in Mozart's skull are everywhere for the
hearing. 

Richard Powers is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Time of Our
Singing."