Brahe's bladder & Mozart's murder
by Brian Kimberling
[ places - september 03 ]
Walking to work each day in Prague I pass two notable buildings: one is Tyn Cathedral, where Tycho Brahe's remains are interred, and the other was Mozart's pied-a-terre during the premiere of Don Giovanni. I am always reminded of two related legends. They are first that Tycho Brahe died of a burst bladder and second that Mozart died of poison from the hand of a rival composer.
The "mother of cities" does seem to nurse a grudge against her famous foreign sons - take Franz Kafka, who died of lingering tuberculosis at 40, and Rainer Maria Rilke, who died of leukaemia at 51. But Brahe's bladder did not burst and Mozart was almost certainly not murdered.
Tycho Brahe died in 1601 at 54. He had come to Prague from his native Denmark to serve as Imperial Mathematician under Rudolph II. Legend holds that during a banquet held by Rudolph or another worthy, Brahe had to pee so bad his bladder burst. The etiquette of the day required that he not rise before his host. Probably he did postpone urinating despite extreme discomfort. His bladder did not, however, pop on the spot as some Prague guidebooks suggest.
Arriving home he was unable to urinate (or sleep) for five days. Thereafter he fell into anguished delirium for another six days before he died. He seems to have been oddly certain of his coming death. Repeatedly he said that he wanted not to have lived in vain.
Modern forensics has established - by testing remnants of his beard exhumed from his cathedral tomb - that he probably died of mercury poisoning. Foul play cannot be ruled out but the favored theory is that he took medicine of high mercury content - common in those days - to treat a longstanding urinary problem.
Indeed, so exact were the tests that it was determined from the relative position of the mercury within a single hair's length that Brahe ingested a significant quantity of the stuff about 20 hours before his death.
Brahe was an intriguing character: he had a silver prosthetic nose, for one thing, having lost the original in a duel. He is said to have reveled fiercely all his life and he kept a dwarf as a jester and an elk as a pet. A burst bladder fits nicely into this general description and seems a fitting end.
However Brahe would surely prefer - witness his dying wish - to be remembered for his scientific achievements. In addition to creating the most sophisticated astronomical instruments to date, and tutoring the next generation of astronomers including Johannes Kepler, Brahe introduced a meticulousness of observation without which further advances in astronomy would have been impossible.
Perhaps his most significant achievement was demonstrating that the universe is not a perfect and static thing, but a mutable and dynamic one. It was the astronomical equivalent of proving the Earth is not flat.
Mozart's case is sketchier. Buried in a paupers' mass grave his remains cannot be exhumed for forensic tests. Doctors in attendance at his death pronounced the cause "miliary fever", which means essentially that he had a high temperature and some spots. This diagnosis being manifestly unsatisfactory, medical men have for 200 years speculated on theoretical ailments ranging from Mozart's kidneys to his heart to his lungs.
More recently Czech-born film director Milos Forman, in the blockbuster Amadeus, reinvigorated an old theory that Mozart was poisoned by Antonio Salieri. Poison is indeed what Mozart himself suspected. And like Brahe he had eerie premonitions that his nearing demise was certain.
"I know by my feelings that my hour has come," he wrote to a friend. "It is striking even now! I am in the region of death."
Modern theory, however, holds that Mozart fell victim to trichinosis, a worm-borne affliction affiliated with uncooked pork. The evidence lies primarily in a letter to his wife mentioning an impending pork dinner, written in chronological coincidence with the gestation period of trichinosis. Furthermore, surviving descriptions of his symptoms tally with those of trichinosis, while other possibilities leave some symptoms unexplained.
Unmatched skill and infinite beauty, annihilated by a pork chop. Poetic justice has never been so spurned. You might sooner expect worms from pig innards to extinguish one of Brahe's bright stars than to eliminate Mozart's musical genius forever. It is not only horrifying but insulting - as if the governing forces of Brahe's shifting cosmos had eradicated a superlative man by something less than chance or design.
Not all Prague's geniuses are as hexed as foreigners Brahe and Mozart and Kafka and Rilke. Her bona fide Czech artists fare remarkably well: Antonin Dvorak died in Prague aged 89. Jaroslav Siefert claimed a Nobel Prize for his poetry at the age of 84. Though his health is always in doubt, Vaclav Havel exemplifies a brilliant career.
For Brahe and Mozart there is no absolute proof of how they died, only ever-better-educated guesses. But when we say that Brahe died of a burst bladder, we are not speaking the truth, and when we invent meaningful deaths for Mozart, we are probably misleading ourselves.
