There are endless theories about why Mozart died at the age of 35, but the reality could be quite simple

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has died a hundred deaths, more or less. Here's a new one: darkness.

Doctors over the years have resurrected the story of Mozart's death again and again, each time proposing some alternative horrifying medical reason why the 18th century's most celebrated and prolific composer keeled over at age 35. A new monograph suggests that Mozart died from too little sunlight.

The researchers give us a simple theory. When exposed to sunlight, people's skin naturally produces vitamin D. Mozart, toward the end of his life, was nearly as nocturnal as a vampire, so his skin probably produced very little vitamin D. (The man failed to take any vitamin D supplements to counteract that deficiency. But that wasn't Mozart's fault. Only much later, in the 1920s, did scientists identify a clear link between vitamin D, sunlight, and good health. Vitamin D supplements did not go on sale in Salzburg and Vienna, Mozart's home towns, until many years after that.)

Stefan Pilz (who, if he plays his cards right, will hereafter be known as "Vitamin" Pilz) and William B Grant published their report, called Vitamin D Deficiency Contributed to Mozart's Death, in a journal called Medical Problems of Performing Artists. Pilz is a physician/researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. Grant is a California physicist whose background is in optical and laser remote sensing of the atmosphere, and atmospheric sciences.

Pilz and Grant explain: "Mozart did much of his composing at night, so would have slept during much of the day. At the latitude of Vienna, 48º N, it is impossible to make vitamin D from solar ultraviolet-B irradiance for about six months of the year. Mozart died on 5 December, 1791, two to three months into the vitamin D winter."

But they acknowledge the existence of competing medical theories. They do not bother mentioning the possibility, depicted in Peter Shaffer's 1969 play Amadeus, that a rival composer did him in. Other academic studies do examine the evidence for poisoning; most conclude that that evidence is lame.

Rival doctors and historians have presented arguments, in medical and other academic journals, that Mozart perished from acute rheumatic fever, bacterial endocarditis, streptococcal septicemia, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease, brain hemorrhage, hypertensive encephalopathy, congestive heart failure, uremia secondary to chronic kidney disease, pyelonephritis, congenital urinary tract anomaly with obstructive uropathy, bronchopneumonia, hemorrhagic shock, post-streptococcal Henoch-Schönlein purpura, polyarthritis, trichinellosis, amyloidosis, and quite a few other unpleasantnesses.

Other studies have tried to tease out biomedical causes for some of Mozart's eccentric behaviour. Two of the more abstruse are by Benjamin Simkin. In 1999 he wrote about a concept called "pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcal infection" (Pandas). The study is called Was Pandas Associated with Mozart's Personality Idiosyncrasies? It expanded on Simkin's curse-filled 1992 monograph, in the British Medical Journal, called Mozart's Scatological Disorder.

(Thanks to Jim Cowdery for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize