“As people read the symptoms and patterns of the disease as written by the contemporaneous authors,” Dr. Dawson said in a recent interview, “these physicians, in their own minds, try to put together, ‘What does this represent?’ ”

The outline of Mozart’s final illness is clear. He took to his bed on Nov. 20, 1791, after an intense period that produced “The Magic Flute,” “La Clemenza di Tito,” the Clarinet Concerto, a Masonic cantata and parts of his Requiem. His hands and feet swelled. He grew listless, suffered vomiting fits and ran a fever.

On Dec. 4 several friends apparently went to his bedside to sing parts of the Requiem. In the evening Mozart took a turn for the worse, and his doctor, Thomas Closset, was summoned from the theater but sent word that he would come once the show was over. When he arrived, he ordered cold compresses applied to Mozart’s head, which witnesses said caused the patient to shudder. An hour past midnight on Dec. 5, Mozart was dead, at 35.

Closset diagnosed Mozart’s ailment as acute miliary fever, which is more a description than a disease, miliary being a term used to describe millet-sized pustules  effectively, a rash. It was put down as the official cause of death in the records of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Mozart’s body was buried, without marking, in a common grave, according to the typical practice of the day for the Viennese middle class, ensuring that no remains that are indisputedly his are available for testing.

Dr. Dawson is not the first to survey theories about Mozart’s death. One of the major scholars in the area is L. R. Karhausen, a physician in France who came up in 1998 with the figure 118 for the causes of death that Dr. Dawson cites in his article.

Dr. Dawson declines to give his own specific number. But he divides the causes into five groups: poisoning, infection, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and miscellaneous. Bloodletting as a treatment may also have hastened Mozart’s death.