What Didn't Kill Mozart

Not one for bronzing up

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have been stricken with many ailments, but if you were to believe recent reports, it was vitamin D deficiency that principally led to him to an early grave.

It’s not to be denied that Mozart could have been as ivory in complexion as the keys that he struck to earn his keep: the man lived at a northerly latitude—where the winter sun isn’t strong enough to induce the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin—and if his personality were to be put in musical terms, he was allegedly something of a nocturne.  Unlike other vitamins, there’s no vitamin D in most food sources, and the majority is obtained from exposure to sunlight. At the time of Mozart’s death (1791), there was little knowledge of vitamin D, let alone ways of measuring his status, so for all we know he could well have had insufficient or deficient levels of the vitamin. But there are two big ambiguities that should temper unsubstantiated chatter about Mozart having succumbed to his dappled lifestyle.

Firstly, there is the question of murky historical details. Now, I don’t confess to know much about the life and times of Mozart. I could tell you more about any given Ramones member than I could about classical music’s Austrian princeling. That said, no one else knows much about the circumstances of the maestro’s death either. He was struck down at 35, and his short run was marred by a series of ailments. He was committed to the soil soon after he died, without even the rudimentary discernment that an eighteenth century autopsy could bring. Medically speaking, we simply don’t know what happened to him, and any attempts to classify a cause of death are speculation.

The author of this new vitamin D hypothesis builds his case on the apparent trend of Mozart falling ill mainly in winter, rather than in the summer months. But sun exposure (and the associated perk of vitamin D production) is unlikely to be the chief reason why people find themselves afflicted more often when the weather is colder, particularly in an era which predated central heating, double glazing and toastie socks.

What compounds the degree of uncertainty which underlies this idea about Mozart’s death is that we don’t actually know how bad vitamin D deficiency can be for your health, beyond well-established detrimental effects it has on bone metabolism. Even if we assume that Mozart had so little vitamin D that his legs bowed like those of workhouse children in Dickensian times (from the adult form of rickets, called osteomalacia), existing evidence does not confirm that he’d be at increased risk of any of the number of conditions which are claimed to have killed him.

It’s true that low vitamin D status has been linked to a multitude of nasty conditions, including infectious diseases, various cancers, renal problems and cardiovascular disease. But we don’t know whether a lack of vitamin D actually causes these things. If vitamin D deficiency does prove to be causative for any conditions, the relative contribution to the pathology of these is likely to be small compared with other factors (such as the contribution of salt intake in raising heart attack risk). In fact, numerous links with a variety of diseases suggest that low vitamin D status is merely a proxy for ill health in general; there are many reasons why we might be bedridden, and they all keep us off the sunny golf course.

If that’s the case, having sufficient amounts of vitamin D is not exactly the miracle cure that overzealous proponents have trumpeted it as. And a few extra hours in the sun probably wouldn’t have saved Mozart.