Biography | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — The Memorial at St. Marx, Not the Plot

People treat the Zentralfriedhof stone as Mozart's grave. The burial was here. St. Marxer Friedhof, at Leberstrasse 6-8 in Landstrasse, opened in 1784 under Joseph II's cemetery rules. Bodies left the inner city after a blessing at Stephansdom. Mozart died on 5 December 1791 in the Rauhensteingasse house, now gone. The blessing was on the afternoon of 6 December. The coffin reached this ground that evening. Burial was either late that night or, more likely, on the morning of the 7th. The plot was an allgemeines einfaches Grab, a common simple grave with a ten-year tenure. In the language of the time that was the ordinary class, not a pauper pit. The exact shaft was lost when the tenure ended and the ground was reused. Constanze looked for it years later and did not find it. Vincent Novello failed again in 1829. On 6 December 1859 the sculptor Hanns Gasser unveiled a memorial at the best-guess site. In 1891, for the centenary of the death, that Gasser stone was moved to the honorary grove at the Zentralfriedhof, Group 32A, beside Beethoven and Schubert. The hole it left at St. Marx was filled in 1899. Cemetery keeper Alexander Kugler assembled a new marker from leftover stones. A broken column and a mourning figure were added. After wartime damage, Florian Josephu-Drouot rebuilt the ensemble in 1950. That is the group a visitor sees. It is a memorial over an approximate plot. It is not a named grave with bones underneath that anyone can prove. The cemetery closed to new burials in 1874. It was put under protection and reopened to walkers in 1937. The paths are quiet. Do not photograph other visitors. Stay on the marked walks. The Zentralfriedhof monument is the later civic afterlife. This ground is where the body went. Photo: Wolfgang Schmidt, CC BY-SA 2.5, Mozart Grabmal Wien StMarx, via Wikimedia Commons