![]() It might have been only a little gratifying for Mesmer that his work, or at least the “most important of the three causes that (Franklin and Colleagues) have (…) assigned to magnetism” (cited from Franklin et al., 2002/1784, p. 255), which meant that he returned to Switzerland and Germany, where he died in 1815. Bereft of his academic and societal credibility, Mesmer’s “last twenty years were spent in obscurity” (cited from Steptoe, 1986, p. 249) during their time in Vienna, but when Mesmer left Vienna for Paris (and his wife in misery), Mozart had little sympathy for the “errant physician, (…) after he had renounced his family in favor of the profits to be found in Paris” (cited from Steptoe, 1986, p. ![]() The families of Mozart and Mesmer were well acquainted, if not to be considered “old friends” (cited from Steptoe, 1986, p. However, Mozart not only provided the music to Mesmer’s social downfall, but further ridiculed the man and his methods in his opera Così fan tutte, in which a fake suicide is mockingly cured by “A piece of magnet, the stone which the great Doctor Mesmer discovered in Germany and then became so famous in France” (Mozart, cited from the Libretto, retrieved ). ![]() Reportedly, Maria Theresia Paradis played the B Flat Concerto Köchelverzeichnis 456, which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote for her tour in Paris. Not only were his methods and underlying principles of animal magnetism disproven by a commission of five members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, which was appointed by Louis XVI under the lead of Franklin ( Franklin et al., 2002/1784), and thus his quest to obtain approval for his approach by the French government all in shambles ( Donaldson, 2005), he further “suffered one of the worst humiliations of his life” when “(a) ll eyes turned toward (him) who had been unwise enough to come to the concert” of Maria Theresia Paradis in September 1784, the very pianist whose blindness he failed to heal some years before during his time in Vienna (cited from Steptoe, 1986, p. 1784 might not have been a year to remember for Franz Anton Mesmer, but rather an annus horribilis. ![]()
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