Researchers say they know – and will soon tell – if skull is Mozart’s

VIENNA, Austria – Have scientists found Mozart’s skull?

Researchers said Tuesday they’ll reveal the results of DNA tests in a documentary airing Sunday on Austrian television as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.

The tests were done last year by experts at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, and the results will be made public in “Mozart: The Search for Evidence,” to be screened by state broadcaster ORF.

Past tests were inconclusive, but this time, “we succeeded in getting a clear result,” lead researcher Dr. Walther Parson, a forensic pathologist, told ORF. He said the results were “100 percent verified” by a U.S. Army laboratory.

For more than a century, the skull has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the elegant Austrian city where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on Jan. 27, 1756.

Parson said genetic material from scrapings from the skull was analyzed and compared to DNA samples gathered in 2004 from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and a niece. The bones were recovered when a family grave was opened in 2004.

Mozart died in 1791 at age 35 and was buried in a pauper’s grave at Vienna’s St. Mark’s Cemetery. The location of the grave was initially unknown, but its likely location was determined in 1855.

The grave now is adorned by a column and a sad-looking angel.