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Vienna (dpa) - A costly scientific project conducted to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the birth of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has ended with an unexpected result.
A group of pathologists from Austria and the United States carried out DNA testing on a skull that has been kept at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, for over a hundred years.
The investigation was carried out on behalf of the Austrian broadcasting channel ORF and was supposed to be prove conclusively that the skull was Mozart's.
A gravedigger, Joseph Rothmayer, who was emptying graves to be used for new burials, is thought to have retrieved the skull from the paupers grave in Vienna's Saint Marx cemetery ten years after Mozart was buried there along with numerous others in 1791.
The skull disappeared until it turned up in 1842 and in 1868 it passed into the possession of the Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl.
The skull was presented to the Mozarteum Foundation in 1902. Since then all scientific experiments to solve the mystery of the skull's authenticity have failed.
An investigation by the Natural History Museum in Vienna at the beginning of the 1990s concluded merely that "there is nothing to dispute the theory that this is Mozart's skull."
The DNA analysis at the Institute of Pathology in Innsbruck, which identified most of the European victims of the Southeast Asia tsunami, was meant to clear up the question once and for all.
At the same time the Armed Forces Identification Laboratory in Rockwell, Maryland in the U.S. also carried out a separate range of tests.
Pathologist Walther Parson in Innsbruck removed two teeth from the skull and extracted samples of DNA.
The investigators also needed a sample of DNA from one of Mozart's female relatives as the composer has no living direct descendents.
As the location of the remains of Mozart's mother, who died in Paris in 1778, and his sister Nannerl are unknown, the investigators opened the Mozart family tomb in Salzburg where the composer's father Leopold is buried.
The remains of eight bodies were removed and samples taken from the bones of what was believed to be Mozart's grandmother Euphrosina Pertl and his niece Jeanette Berchtold zu Sonnenburg.
At the same time a lock of hair at the Mozarteum thought to belong to the composer was also examined.
The outcome of the investigation was different from the one the scientists had hoped for.
"The people who have been examined are not related," admitted Parson in a TV documentary broadcast by ORF on Sunday evening. The result from the U.S. confirmed this.
Apart from the DNA results, the experts at the Mozarteum in Salzburg doubted the skull's authenticity.
"From a historical perspective it was unlikely that it was Mozart's skull," said Stephan Pauly of the institute to the news agency APA.
"Because there are gaps in the story of the skull's origins, we believe its authenticity is improbable. It would have survived only with a great deal of luck," said Pauly.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
