Mozart's skull may or may not have been rediscovered, and you probably didn't even know it was missing.

On Sunday, live on Austrian state television, scientists from the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck declared they could not say whether the skull held by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in fact belonged to the man whom many consider the most sublime composer who ever lived. In what reads like a pilot for a new spinoff — "CSI: Tyrol" — forensic pathologists, employing the highest of high biotech, compared genetic material scraped from the mystery Schaedel with DNA gathered from the thigh bones of Mozart's grandmother and niece.

The results, determined last year and supposedly "100 percent verified" by a U.S. Army laboratory, were held secret for the broadcast of the documentary "Mozart: The Search for Evidence" on this first weekend in the 250th year of Mozart's birth. After a quarter of a millennium, the bones of a man pitched into a common grave are suddenly world news.

Doctors, chemists and forensic pathologists have been prodding at the skull since it was acquired by the Mozarteum more than a century ago, hoping to shed light on the composer's mysterious last illness and death. The skull has come to embody the flurry of myths that swirl around this most inexplicable of humans. In every decade, researchers have vied for the last word about the man's death: rheumatic fever, Henoch-Schoenlein syndrome, manic depression, infectious disease aggravated by bad medical treatment, a hematoma caused by a fall or blow to the head, or even (the perennial popular favorite) murder.

These investigators have probed the skull as if its evidence might render Mozart's mind-boggling musical ability more understandable and thus less disturbing. That the skull exists separately from the skeleton at all is testimony to the 19th-century cutting-edge science of phrenology, and the habit among budding phrenologists of going about collecting the heads of geniuses.

This story follows another of a month ago, when researchers at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory announced "solid evidence" that Beethoven suffered from lead poisoning. Fragments of Beethoven's skull (confirmed, of course, by mitochondrial DNA comparison) were scanned by X-rays from the lab's Advanced Photon Source, which, according to a press release, "provides the most brilliant X-rays in the Western Hemisphere." (A test of such importance is clearly not to be outsourced.)

The test revealed large samples of lead concentration in Beethoven's bone sample, relative to a control. The Argonne team hinted tantalizingly that the accumulation of lead might account for the change in Beethoven's personality and music from his early 20s onward. Jay Leno's take: "Hopefully, the Beethoven family now finally has some closure."

Diagnosing art's unsolved mysteries with state-of-the-art medical knowledge is irresistible. The speculations arise in every season: Oscar Wilde's skin condition resulted from hair dyes; Van Gogh suffered from xanthopsia induced by digitalis; Dostoyevsky owed his visionary power to epilepsy; Pick's disease produced Ravel's "Bolero"; the Mona Lisa's unusual facial musculature came from Bell's palsy. But our present obsession with science's ability to solve crimes and put ancient mysteries to rest has become epidemic.

Three of America's top 10 television shows feature forensic pathologists, and forensic science has become one of the hot undergraduate degrees. We are fed a steady diet of sensational, horrific, aura-filled, definitive revelations about unsolved mysteries that only our latest technologies can provide. We have always wanted to speak with the dead, and now we have more and better tools for listening than ever.

Small wonder, then, that the DNA analysis of Mozart's putative skull has captured international imaginations. No doubt many in the audience for "Mozart: The Search for Evidence" will hope that if the skull indeed turns out to be Mozart's, the Europeans will clone him before the South Koreans do. Others will hope that another of our old secular relics, placed under our ever-improving scopes, might tell us where our culture came from, even as the audience for that culture vanishes into a sea of crime investigation shows.

For my part, I am hoping that cutting-edge molecular biology will tell us that the Mozarteum's skull bears no relation at all to Mozart's grandmother and niece, that the cranium belonged, with 100 percent certainty, to no one in particular — to some other member of that old common grave. Even if DNA analysis does succeed in confirming the skull's identity, it will lay to rest exactly zero of the mysteries still surrounding Mozart. Nor will any future advances in science ever put to rest the unsolved Mozart, the inexplicable genius, that most troubles and transforms us.

If you are really looking for messages from beyond the grave, for a connection with the hidden past, or for sensational, horrific, aura-filled revelations of life and death, you could do worse than listen to the Commendatore's words, in "Don Giovanni," when he comes back to tell the Don truths neither confirmed nor yet disproved by medical science:

Non si pasce di cibo mortale
Chi si pasce di cibo celeste

Those who partake of heavenly food do not need the mortal stuff. What can the bones know that the notes don't? Forget the forensics and face the music. The mysteries hidden in Mozart's skull are everywhere for the hearing.

Richard Powers is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Time of Our Singing."