Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri (August 18, 1750 – May 7, 1825), born in Legnago, Italy, was a composer and conductor, as well as one of the most important and famous musicians of his time.

Salieri and Mozart

In Vienna in the 1790s, Mozart mentioned several "cabals" of Salieri concerning his new opera Così fan tutte. As Mozart's music became more popular over the decades, Salieri's music was forgotten, Mozart's allegations gained credence and tarnished Salieri's reputation. At the beginning of the 19th century, increasing nationalism led to a tendency to transfigure the German Mozart's genius, while the Italian Salieri was given the role of his evil antagonist. Albert Lortzing's Singspiel Szenen aus Mozarts Leben LoWV28 (1832) uses the cliché of the intrigant Salieri trying to hinder Mozart's career. While Italian by birth, Salieri had lived in imperial Vienna since he was 16 years old and was regarded as a German composer. In 1772, Empress Maria Theresia made a comment on her preference to Italian composers over Germans like Gassmann, Salieri or Gluck. Salieri saw himself as a German composer, which some of his German letters, operas, cantatas, and songs seem to prove.

Related Topics:
1790s - Mozart - Così fan tutte - Nationalism - German - Genius - Italian - Antagonist - Albert Lortzing - 1832 - 1772 - Maria Theresia - Gluck

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The biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer believes that Mozart's suspicions of Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of the Princess of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead because of his good reputation as a singing teacher. In the following year Mozart once again failed to be selected as the Princess's piano teacher.

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Later on, when Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro was not well received by either the Emperor Joseph II nor by the public, Mozart blamed Salieri for the failure. "Salieri and his tribe will move heaven and earth to put it down", Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter Nannerl. But at the time of the premiere of Figaro, Salieri was busy with his new French opera Les Horaces. Thayer believes that the intrigues surrounding the failure of Figaro were instigated by the poet Giovanni Battista Casti against the Court Poet, Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the Figaro libretto.

Related Topics:
Le Nozze di Figaro - Leopold Mozart - French - Lorenzo da Ponte - Libretto

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Later, when da Ponte was in Prague preparing the production of Mozart's setting of his Don Giovanni, the poet was ordered back to Vienna for a royal wedding for which Salieri's Axur, Re d'Ormus would be performed. Obviously, Mozart was not pleased by this.

Related Topics:
Prague - Don Giovanni

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There is far more evidence of a cooperative atmosphere between the two composers than for a real enmity, however. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own, and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no less than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even composed a song for voice and piano together, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, which was celebrating the happy return to stage of the famous singer Nancy Storace. This song is unfortunately lost, although it had been printed by Artaria in 1785. Mozart's Davidde penitente K 469 (1785), his piano concerto in E flat major K 482 (1785), the clarinet quintet K 581 (1789) or the great symphony in G minor K 550 had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who even conducted a performance of it in 1791. In his last surviving letter from October 14th 1791, Mozart tells his wife about Salieri's attendance at his opera Die Zauberflöte K 620, speaking enthusiastically: "He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the ouverture to the last choir there was no piece that didn't elicit a bravo or bello out of him "

Related Topics:
1788 - 1790 - Die Zauberflöte

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Salieri's health declined in his later years, and he was hospitalized shortly before his death. It was shortly after he died that rumors first spread that he had confessed to Mozart's murder on his deathbed. Salieri's two nurses, Gottlieb Parsko and Georg Rosenberg, as well as his family doctor Joseph Röhrig, attested that he never said any such thing. At least one of these three people were with him throughout his hospitalization.

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After Salieri's death in 1825, Puschkin's drama Mozart i Saljeri (1831) and the opera setting of this work by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1898) started a tradition of poetic license based on Mozart's allegations, continued and popularized by Peter Shaffer's heavily fictionalized play Amadeus (1979) and the Oscar-winning 1984 film by Milos Forman based on it, in which F. Murray Abraham played Salieri and Tom Hulce played the title character. While it is never explicitly stated in the play that Salieri killed Mozart, he is portrayed as bitterly hating his rival, going so far as to renounce God for blessing Mozart (portrayed in the play as an immature dandy) with fantastic talent while refusing to let him be anything but "a mediocrity." (A "Director's Cut" was released on 2001 with an additional 20 minutes of footage).

Related Topics:
Puschkin - Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov - 1898 - Peter Shaffer - Amadeus - 1979 - Oscar - 1984 - Milos Forman - F. Murray Abraham - Tom Hulce - 2001

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In addition to the allegations of murder, the movie also portrays Salieri as a mediocre composer, an intriguer, and a blasphemer. In reality, his talent was then and is to this day applauded, and numerous contemporaries attested his kind nature and public-spirited mind. His religious devotion is undisputed by his biographers. In a way, Shaffer's depiction of Salieri is similar to Shakespeare's characterization of Richard III; he makes for a complex, fascinating villain, despite much historical evidence to the contrary.

Related Topics:
Blasphemer - Shakespeare - Richard III - Villain

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Proponents of the theory that Salieri plotted against Mozart point to a suicide attempt of Salieri in 1823, claiming that it was due to the old composer's guilt over his anti-Mozart activities. However, it is far more plausible that the suicide attempt - if it ever took place - was due to his depression because of the loss of his favorite pupil, twelve-year-old Franz Liszt, who had very recently left on a musical tour of Europe. This would be far more likely to affect Salieri's state of mind than anguish over events that had supposedly happened a third of a century previously.

Related Topics:
1823 - Franz Liszt

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