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Winnipeg Free Press

Mozart was bled to death

Thursday, November 24th, 2005 - VAL WERIER

STEFAN Carter has memories of being a toddler and listening as his parents and a friend played chamber music in their home in Warsaw before the Second World War. His mother Janina played the piano, his father Waclaw the violin, the friend the cello.

This love of music is one reason why Carter has written a book, Mozart, A Meditation on his Life and Mysterious Death.

Another reason is that Carter is a doctor, so fascinated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that he analysed all the evidence and more about his demise and came to this conclusion: He was probably killed by his doctors. They bled him to death to combat bad "humours."

It is intriguing that a Winnipeg physician should shed some light on Mozart, a genius who created masterpieces in several genres, including opera, instrumental and song. His genius was beyond understanding. How could heart and mind produce such magnificent music?

A child of the Holocaust, Carter finds solace in music. He plays the recorder and violin and more recently, the clarinet, partly because of Mozart's music composed for the instrument.

His parents were "exterminated" by the Nazis but he managed to survive in the Warsaw ghetto.

He was sponsored to come to Winnipeg in 1948 at the age of 20. He learned English by reading books and using a dictionary. He was accepted into medicine at the University of Manitoba and has had a distinguished career heading the vascular medicine department at the St. Boniface General Hospital.

With similar deliberation, Carter looked into the mysterious death of Mozart, finding new material on his

family and sifting through works which had given answers to his ailments. Carter gave it a sharper focus.

Critics had claimed that Mozart was a philanderer, (in fact he had an excellent relationship with his wife) and that he had died of syphilis. Others insisted he had been poisoned.

The medical evidence shows otherwise. Mozart suffered from rheumatic fever, a debilitating ailment with high temperatures, swollen joints and weakened organs. He also had streptococcal infection which was hard to control.

Mozart was a prolific composer in a period of extraordinary flowering of the arts, a time when colleagues were Beethoven and Haydn. He was an exuberant man, played cards, loved good food and wine, spoke several languages and read Shakespeare. He had a deep religious faith but a profound distrust of the clergy.

In the period before he died in 1791, Mozart was working at a strenuous pace, composing the Requiem and other pieces including a clarinet concerto. His acute rheumatic fever, and arthritis so severe that he could hardly walk, contributed to his death, hastened by the practice at the time of bloodletting as a cure. On top of that, he was subjected to stress, caused by a suit for debt by one his patrons.

Carter relates some fascinating anecdotes about Mozart. On April 17, 1784, he presented his latest creation, a concerto for piano and violin at a concert in Vienna. Mozart played the piano and Regina Strinasacchi, an Italian artist, the violin. Emperor Joseph II was so impressed he asked to see the score. The violin score was provided but for the piano there was a blank. Mozart had finished the sonata at the last minute and had no time for the piano text. So he played the piano from notes inscribed in his mind. That is an astounding feat, encompassing thousands of notes, for the sonata was 15 minutes in duration.

Says Carter: "Mozart's music was most appealing to the human spirit."

His book is published by Peter St. John and Barbara Huck of Heartland Publications, a Winnipeg-based publisher of history, heritage, travel and non-fiction. The book is dedicated to his parents and to his aunt and uncle Stanislawa and Maksymilian Centnerszwer.

Carter's love of culture and medicine are shared too by his sons Joel, a doctor, and Andrew, a director with a masters degree in fine arts, and by his wife Emilee, an artist.

The book will be celebrated at McNally Robinson next Wednesday evening, another cultural event, this one encompassing the fields of music and medicine.