In the dead of night, a few hours after Mozart's death, the usual suspects are summoned to Mozart's room by Count Pergen, head of the secret police, who considered Mozart a potential revolutionary. Over the corpse, he interrogates them, trying to discover the true cause and significance of Mozart's demise.
At the beginning was the Slovak television series Lekár umierajúceho czasu (Doctor of Dying Time), dedicated to the Rudolphine-era scientist Jan Jesenius. He ended up on the scaffold along with other gentlemen after losing the anti-Habsburg uprising. When director Miloslav Luther conceived the idea of making an abridged version of the footage for cinema, he had to not only rebuild the storyline but also dub it into Czech. However, the result was only an illustrative puzzle, describing the various stages of the hero's turbulent life.
