Antonio Salieri

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Antonio Salieri died in Vienna on the 7th of May 1825, and at his memorial service six weeks later, the music played was his own Requiem in C minor, a piece he had composed two decades earlier but never heard performed. He was 74, had spent his final months in dementia, and had attempted suicide the previous November. The man who conducted some of the grandest premieres of his age, who taught Beethoven and Schubert and Liszt, who held the post of Austrian imperial Kapellmeister for thirty-six years, ended his life tormented by a rumor he could never fully escape: that he had poisoned Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  That rumor is false. The symptoms of Mozart's final illness do not point to poisoning, and the evidence left by both men suggests they were, at minimum, mutually respectful peers. Yet the legend devoured the biography. When Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus opened in 1979, followed by Miloš Forman's Oscar-winning film version in 1984, Salieri's name returned to public consciousness almost entirely through the lens of a murderous, Iago-esque schemer. For a century before that, his music had simply disappeared, fading from performance between 1800 and 1868 until it was rarely heard at all.

  Who was the actual Salieri? He was born in the Republic of Venice in 1750, orphaned in his early teens, taken under the wing of a Viennese court composer, and built into one of the most powerful musical figures in late eighteenth-century Europe. He shaped operatic form, launched the career of La Scala, opened Paris to reform opera, and trained a generation of composers whose names still fill concert halls. The questions worth asking are not about rivalry and poison. They are about how a boy from Legnago rose to dominate the musical world of Vienna, what he actually created there, and how a fictionalized version of his life came to erase the real one.

• 2. From Legnago to Vienna

  ›

  Salieri was born on the 18th of August 1750 to a family in the town of Legnago, south of Verona in the Republic of Venice. His earliest musical instruction came from his older brother Francesco, who had studied with the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini. The boy twice ran away from home without permission to hear Francesco play violin concertos in neighboring churches on festival days. When his father chastised him for failing to greet a local priest with proper respect, young Salieri replied that the priest's organ playing displeased him for being too theatrical a style for a church.

  Between 1763 and 1764, both of his parents died. He was briefly taken in by a monk in Padua, then became the ward of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo around 1765 or 1766. While living in Venice he studied with the organist and opera composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti, and then, after Pescetti's sudden death, with the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini. It was through Pacini that the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann first heard of the young orphan. Gassmann was impressed enough to take Salieri to Vienna personally and fund the remainder of his education himself.

  Salieri and Gassmann arrived in Vienna on the 15th of June 1766. Gassmann's first act was to take his new pupil to the Italian Church to consecrate their relationship to God, an event Salieri remembered for the rest of his life. His studies covered Latin and Italian poetry, the German language, European literature, vocal composition, and thoroughbass. His theoretical grounding in harmony and counterpoint came from Johann Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, which Salieri translated during each Latin lesson. He continued to live in Gassmann's household even after Gassmann married, an arrangement that lasted until 1774, the year Gassmann died and Salieri himself married Therese Helferstorfer, the daughter of a court treasury official.

  Beginning in 1766, Gassmann introduced the teenager to the daily chamber music performances held during Emperor Joseph II's evening meal. Salieri impressed the Emperor quickly, and Gassmann was told to bring his pupil as often as he wished. That relationship between monarch and musician would last until Joseph's death in 1790. At Sunday morning salons hosted by the Martinez family, Salieri met two figures who would shape the rest of his career: Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, the celebrated court poet known as Metastasio, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Metastasio gave Salieri informal lessons in prosody and the declamation of Italian verse; Gluck became an advisor, friend, and confidante whose influence would follow Salieri to Paris.

• 3. An Operatic Vocabulary

  ›

  Salieri's first full opera, Le donne letterate, was composed during the winter and carnival season of 1770, based on Molière's Les Femmes Savantes with a libretto by a dancer in the court ballet who was also a brother of the composer Luigi Boccherini. Its modest success launched what would become a thirty-four-year career writing more than thirty-five original dramas for the stage.

  From his earliest works, Salieri showed a consistent habit of testing the boundaries between established operatic forms. His pastoral opera L'amore innocente gave the lead female roles contrasting coloratura passages borrowed from opera seria, even though the piece was a light comedy in the manner of a Roman intermezzo. His Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamace combined ballet and opera buffa, drawing on an episode from Cervantes. These were not accidental mixings. The pushing against genre conventions was, as his career would show, a deliberate personal signature.

  His first great success in serious opera came with Armida, which premiered on the 2nd of June 1771. Based on Torquato Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata, the work dramatized a conflict between love and duty set during the First Crusade, combining ballet, aria, ensemble, and choral writing in a form that followed Gluck's reform principles while drawing on musical ideas from both opera seria and opera buffa. Armida was translated into German and widely performed, particularly in the northern German states, helping to establish Salieri's name beyond Vienna. It was also the first of his operas to receive a serious piano and vocal reduction, prepared in 1783.

  The following year brought La Fiera di Venezia, a commedia per musica that premiered on the 29th of January 1772. The opera featured characters singing in three languages, included an innovative scene combining on-stage dances with singing from soloists and chorus simultaneously, and introduced bravura arias for a soprano playing a middle-class character that blended coloratura with concertante woodwind solos. That combination of dance and simultaneous vocal writing was a pattern imitated by later composers; Mozart's treatment of a similar scene in Don Giovanni is the most famous example. Salieri also introduced, in his opera La secchia rapita, the first known use of three timpani in an operatic score.

• 4. Court Power and Paris

  ›

  Upon Gassmann's death on the 21st of January 1774, Salieri succeeded him as assistant director of the Italian opera at the Habsburg court. That same year he was formally appointed director of the Italian opera, a post he would hold until 1792. His appointment placed him at the center of Vienna's musical life, but that position was not permanent by nature. When Joseph II ended Italian opera in 1777 following financial collapse and reopened the court theaters as a German-language National Theater, Salieri's influence contracted sharply. He had never fully mastered German, and there were few commissions on offer. He began looking for opportunities abroad.

  In 1778, Gluck turned down the commission to compose the inaugural opera for La Scala in Milan. On the suggestion of both Joseph II and Gluck himself, Salieri was offered the commission instead. He accepted gratefully, and his Italian tour of 1778-80 opened with Europa riconosciuta at La Scala. One work from that tour, La Scuola de' gelosi, a witty study of amorous intrigue, proved a lasting international success and would serve as the opening production when the Italian opera company was revived in Vienna in 1783.

  Gluck's patronage brought Salieri to Paris again in the early 1780s. The opera Les Danaïdes, a five-act tragédie lyrique based on the first play of an Aeschylus trilogy, was originally presented to the Parisian press as a new work by Gluck with Salieri's assistance. In reality, Gluck had completed none of the scores and handed the entire project to his young collaborator. He feared that Parisian critics would dismiss an opera by a composer associated primarily with comic works. The ruse shifted gradually: first the opera was billed as jointly by both men, then, after popular and critical success, Gluck acknowledged in a public letter that the work was entirely by Salieri. A young Hector Berlioz recorded the deep impression Les Danaïdes made on him in his Mémoires. The opera, with its dark overture, choral writing, ballet scenes, and an electrifying finale depicting hellish torment, held the Paris stage for over forty years.

  Salieri's next major Parisian work was Tarare, with a libretto by Beaumarchais. The opera was designed as a complete new synthesis of poetry and music, intended as a reform work surpassing what Gluck had achieved. Its success was significant enough that Joseph II commissioned Lorenzo Da Ponte to translate it into Italian as Axur, re d'Ormus. That Italian version was staged at the royal wedding of Franz II in 1788, and Axur went on to become Salieri's greatest international success, eventually reaching South America when the exiled Portuguese royal house performed it in 1824.

• 5. Mozart and the Rivalry Question

  ›

  In the 1780s, while Mozart was living and working in Vienna, he and his father Leopold wrote in their letters about what they described as cabals of Italian composers led by Salieri working to block Mozart's career. Mozart wrote to his father in December 1781 that "the only one who counts in the Emperor's eyes is Salieri." In May 1783 he described Salieri and Da Ponte in terms suggesting they were allied against him, and in July 1783 he wrote of "a trick of Salieri's."

  The rivalry had a concrete professional dimension. In 1781, when Mozart applied to become music teacher to Princess Elisabeth of Württemberg, Salieri was selected instead, largely because of his established reputation as a singing teacher. The following year Mozart again failed to be chosen as the princess's piano teacher. At the opera competition staged by Joseph II in 1786 at the Orangery at Schönbrunn, Mozart was considered the loser. Salieri and Da Ponte were not simply abstract enemies in Mozart's imagination; they occupied positions that Mozart wanted and exercised influence that Mozart resented.

  Yet the record also contains evidence of mutual support that the popular narrative ignores. When Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, he chose to revive Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro rather than introduce a new opera of his own. When Salieri traveled to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790, he brought three Mozart masses with him. The two men jointly composed a cantata, Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, celebrating the return to the stage of the singer Nancy Storace. That work was printed by Artaria in 1785, then considered lost, until a musicologist named Timo Jouko Herrmann found a copy while researching Salieri in the collections of the Czech Museum of Music; the Schwäbische Zeitung reported the discovery on the 10th of January 2016. Salieri also encouraged the premieres of several major Mozart works, including the Piano Concerto KV 482, the Clarinet Quintet, and the 40th Symphony. In Mozart's last surviving letter, dated the 14th of October 1791, he described driving Salieri and the singer Caterina Cavalieri to see The Magic Flute, and noted that Salieri applauded every piece, calling out "Bravo!" and "Bello!" from the overture to the final chorus.

  Mozart's death in 1791 at the age of 35 set off rumors that Salieri had poisoned him. Those rumors accelerated into fiction: Alexander Pushkin dramatized them in his 1831 "little tragedy" Mozart and Salieri, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov set that text as an opera in 1898. Salieri was, by the accounts of his biographer Ignaz von Mosel, deeply affected by the widespread public belief in the story, which he vehemently denied. The psychological weight of those accusations contributed to the nervous breakdowns he suffered in his later years.

• 6. Teacher and Late Works

  ›

  Even after Salieri voluntarily withdrew from writing operas in 1804, he remained one of the most sought-after teachers in Vienna. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart were among the most celebrated students he trained. He also instructed prominent singers throughout his career, including Caterina Canzi. All but the wealthiest of his pupils received their lessons free of charge, a practice Salieri credited to the kindness Gassmann had shown him as a penniless orphan.

  As Kapellmeister of the Imperial Chapel, a post he held from 1788 until his official retirement in 1824, Salieri was responsible for the music and musical school attached to the court chapel. His duties in those final decades required a large output of sacred works, including two complete sets of vespers, many graduals and offertories, and four orchestral masses. In 1815 he composed one substantial instrumental work: Twenty-Six Variations for the Orchestra on a Theme called La Folia di Spagna. The Folía theme was folk-derived and had inspired many baroque composers before him. Salieri's setting is a brooding piece in the minor key, focused on deft and varied handling of orchestral colors rather than melodic transformation. It was the most monumental set of orchestral variations written before Brahms composed his Variations on a Theme by Haydn.

  Salieri also continued to conduct publicly into old age. On the 18th of March 1808 he conducted a performance of Haydn's The Creation during which Haydn collapsed. He led several premieres by Beethoven as well, including the 1st and 2nd Piano Concertos and Wellington's Victory. He lost his only son in 1805 and his wife Therese in 1807. His last opera, a German-language Singspiel set in colonial Virginia with a text by Georg Friedrich Treitschke (who also wrote the libretto for Beethoven's Fidelio), was performed in 1804 to complete failure. Salieri's own assessment of what had changed around him was recorded by Mosel: "From that period circa 1800 I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner completely contrary to that of my own times. Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity."

• 7. The Second Life of Salieri

  ›

  Salieri's music faded almost entirely from performance between 1800 and 1868, and was rarely heard again until late in the twentieth century. Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, which opened in 1979 with Paul Scofield in the role at London's National Theatre and Ian McKellen on Broadway, returned his name to public consciousness. The 1984 film adaptation directed by Miloš Forman, in which F. Murray Abraham won the Academy Award for Best Actor portraying a Machiavellian Salieri, gave the fictionalized version its widest possible audience. The revival of scholarly and performance interest in his actual music came partly in the wake of that exposure, even as the dramatic version bore little relation to the historical record.

  In 2003, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli released The Salieri Album, a recording of thirteen arias from his operas, most of which had never been recorded before. Diana Damrau released a disc of seven Salieri coloratura arias in 2008. Since 2000, complete recordings of operas including Axur re d'Ormus, Falstaff, Les Danaïdes, and La grotta di Trofonio have been issued or reissued. In 2004, Europa riconosciuta was staged in Milan for the reopening of La Scala, with Damrau in the title role, broadcast on television. In November 2009, Il mondo alla rovescia received its first staging in modern times at the Teatro Salieri in Legnago, the city of Salieri's birth, where the theater now bears his name.

  His music has also found its way into film soundtracks, not always in ironic contexts. The 2001 film The Last Castle used his triple concerto as theme music for a character the film frames as a lesser man overshadowed by someone he cannot measure up to. The 2008 film Iron Man used the Larghetto from Salieri's Piano Concerto in C major in a scene where a powerful industrialist is ousted from his own company. His Requiem in C minor, composed in 1804, was performed for the first time at his memorial service on the 22nd of June 1825, six weeks after his death. The Fondazione Culturale Antonio Salieri now sponsors an annual autumn opera festival in Legnago, dedicated to recovering his work and that of his contemporaries.