The death mask of Brahms
Johannes Brahms
12.
What was Brahms’s cause of death?
Brahms died on April 3, 1897. For many years, his cause of death was thought to be liver cancer. However, it now appears that he actually suffered from pancreatic cancer, which metastasized and damaged his liver. The proximate cause of death was thus liver failure.
The composer started to feel fatigued and ill at the end of May in 1896. Inexplicably, he started to lose weight and developed jaundice just a couple of months later. Brahms was treated by the finest doctors in Vienna, but the disease progressed rapidly, and the state of cancer treatment in the 1890s was certainly not what it is today, alas.
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