Author’s Note
Having trained as a classical pianist and had a deep interest in music all my life, I have always been intrigued by the story of Mozart 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 truth 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 colourless, tasteless and water-soluble formula gets its name from the infamous seventeenth-century Italian poisoner Giulia Toffana, 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 hallucinations, obsessive preoccupation with death, and severe depression. Loosely speaking, these symptoms could point to a diagnosis of rheumatic 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 Schaffer’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. However-as Professor Arno tells us later in the story-this is inconsistent 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.
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 ideology 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.
A CONVERSATION WITH SCOTT MARIANI
Q: How long did it take you to carry out all the research for The Mozart Conspiracy?
A: It’s an idea that has been in my mind for quite a few years. I’ve always been a big Mozart fan, and while browsing in a bookshop in Bologna, Italy, one day in 1997, I came across a fascinating little non-fiction book called Mozart’s Last Year, by the musicologist H.C Robbins Landon. That was when I started looking at the history behind Mozart in more depth, investigating many other sources of information as I became more involved with it. It was quite a few years before it occurred to me that this could form the back-story to a Ben Hope thriller!
Q: Did you have anyone in mind as inspiration when you created Ben and Leigh? Who do you think could play them in a movie?
A: Ben Hope is a character who’s been living in my head for quite a long time-and of course he has already appeared in the previous adventure The Alchemist’s Secret. I didn’t write him with any particular actor in mind, although I can think of a few with the right qualities to play him. It would have to be someone very talented and sensitive, able to combine Ben’s toughness and vulnerability. Leigh was a somewhat different matter, as from the very start I had a clear idea of her in my mind. Think about it-she’s dark, beautiful, a singer, Welsh…for me, Catherine Zeta-Jones is Leigh Llewellyn.
Q: Do you draw upon your own experiences with family and friends as you create characters and plots?
A: I certainly hope none of them recognise themselves in characters like Jack Glass or Werner Kroll! Seriously, I’ve never consciously drawn on anyone I know to help build a character. I don’t tend to look at people and think ‘Hey, I can put you in my story’. Inevitably, you draw on things from your own life experience to a certain degree-for instance Ben happens to have attended the same college as me. But I think that in general my own personal life experience has a limited amount of influence. I work very much from within the imagination.
Q: Which writers do you particularly admire? What kinds of books have inspired you?
A: I very much like thriller writers such as John Grisham, Lee Child and Stephen Hunter. However, I’m probably more influenced and inspired by films than by other books. I’m pleased that so many readers comment that the Ben Hope books are very cinematic in style, and they can really see the images unfolding as they read. Maybe that’s my love of movies showing through-who knows?
Q: What is your daily writing routine?
A: There is no typical writing day. I usually find I get my best work done in the morning, although I will often find myself working late into the night and getting into quite a ‘roll’ with it. One of the great things about writing is that you can model your working hours according to other things going on in your life. When the weather’s good I like to spend time outdoors, enjoying the countryside with my partner and our dogs. I’m also a keen archer and have converted one of my barns into an indoor range. Any time I get stuck writing, I can go in there and do some shooting. It’s very relaxing, and also helps the imagination to flow.