It is likely that the Mozart family could pay for all medical care through most of his life.

His documented pathography starts at the age of 6 years with scarlet fever, and until the age of 29 years, it includes, among other things, rheumatism, typhoid fever, smallpox, migraine, and pneumonia. Mozart suffered from frequent and lengthy illnesses. You just have to listen to the chilling and demonic and desolate orchestral landscape of the slow movement of Bruckner’s 7th, and do not forget the aggressive, apocalyptic, and despairing visions of cosmic pain in the third movement of his unfinished 9th symphony! This unfortunate situation had also the effect that many Romantic artists were visited by diseases for which no cure existed. This was the result of intensified trading with other (non-European) countries that brought contagions and spread horrible illnesses. During this period, bacterial and viral diseases were common. Furthermore, Romantic composers did not use one fixed key or tempo in their compositions like Bach but embraced chromatic tonality. Romantic music may not only be composed for a single instrument or just a few instruments like Chopin’s nocturnes and Beethoven’s string quartets but also for works with complex orchestrations like Mahler’s and Bruckner’s symphonies. This new style is part of a movement in which freedom of thought, expression of emotion, and inspiration by nature predominate. The composers strived for compositions that expressed human life, including happiness, harmony, and despair. Romantic music, as a successor of baroque and classical music, is generally characterized by its expression of emotion. The period 1800–1910 is commonly considered the era in which the Romantic style in arts became an important part of cultural life. Although many questions will remain unanswered, it appears that the diseases of these composers and their causes of death have their origins in alcohol abuses, age, epidemics (like tuberculosis), and syphilis. It is evident that from the perspective of modern medicine, symptoms and forensic facts are not complete, but witnesses’ reports and recent medical research have provided passable and plausible clarity. This text dwells on diseases and the cause of death of ten composers, namely Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Liszt, Mahler, and Bruckner. Primarily, this review refers to clinically significant findings using reports that were retrieved from PubMed, Embase, and Google over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries till 14th June 2021. This article serves to address the cause of death and relevant biographic data of a number of well-known Romantic composers. During this period, intensive trading with other parts of the world brought new microorganisms along, which made infections and epidemics very common. They lived in a period in which freedom of thought, expression of emotion, and inspiration by nature predominated. The musical composers in the Romantic Era (1800–1910) strived for compositions that expressed human life, including happiness, harmony, and despair.

Deaf composer