Following Imperial Royal Kapellmeister Mozart’s death on December 5, 1791, things moved quickly. Around two o’clock the very next afternoon (on account of the noxious state of the remains), Mozart’s corpse was taken over to Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral where it received a quick blessing. Then gravediggers coached it down the road to the St. Marxer Friedhof where, in accordance with a city ordinance by Emperor Joseph II, it was uncoffined and placed in a mass grave. Proceedings appear to have been concluded in just ninety minutes, sunset taking place just after four o’clock. No mourners, not even the widow, witnessed the burial. Even today, Mozart’s exact whereabouts are a mystery. Although the composer’s friend Franz-Joseph Haydn, later said that posterity “would not see such talent again in a hundred years,” it is surprising that for many of those years nobody much cared where Mozart was buried.

Two miles away and thirty-six years later saw an entirely different state of affairs: Following Beethoven’s death in March 1827, Europe was plunged into mourning. The body lay in state in Beethoven’s Schwartzspanierstrasse apartment for three days while a death mask was taken and members of the public helped themselves to locks of his hair. On a specially declared public holiday, the body was taken to the Church of the Holy Trinity, a few hundred yards away. So packed were the streets, however, that the procession took an hour and a half. Schubert (who would be an immediate neighbor of