MUSEUM staff in Salzburg refused for years to go near the case displaying the skull that had reputedly housed the brain of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Notes, even screams, were said to emanate from it at night: signs, perhaps, of a tortured soul.

Now Mozart fans will be told whether the skull belonged to the composer. “DNA comparisons have succeeded in obtaining a clear result,” Walther Parson, of the University of Innsbruck, said. The result will be announced tomorrow as part of Austria’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Scrapings from the skull have been compared with DNA samples from the exhumed bones of Mozart ’s family. The skull has been in the safekeeping of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg since 1902.

If the skull is genuine it could help to clear up a debate about the cause of Mozart’s death in 1791. The official cause of death was recorded as “severe military fever”. His miserable death fuelled rumours of poisoning, and fingers were pointed at Antonio Salieri, a rival composer, and the husband of one of Mozart’s married lovers.

Pierre-François Puech, of the University of Provence, has suggested that Mozart died of a head injury. The skull shows signs of a fracture on the left temple: this could explain the composer’s headaches, which grew worse in his last year. Mozart was initially buried in a pauper’s grave. Ten years later, the grave in the Cemetery of St Marx in Vienna was retrenched. It was opened by the sexton Joseph Rothmayer, who had buried Mozart, and had tied wire to his throat to identify him. According to records, Rothmayer gave the skull to a friend, who passed it on to Jacob Hyrtl. A member of Hyrtl’s family eventually gave the skull to the Salzburg museum.

Doubts on the skull’s authenticity were cast by an archivist who found a doctor’s description of Mozart’s body noting that he had only seven teeth. The skull in Salzburg had 11.