Antonio Salieri: The Rival History Invented
In November 1823, a hospitalised and mentally failing old man in Vienna accused himself of poisoning Mozart, then took it back whenever his mind cleared. The confession was worthless — Mozart's symptoms indicate no poisoning at all — but it was enough. Pushkin wrote a play, Rimsky-Korsakov made it an opera, Peter Shaffer turned it into a hit and Miloš Forman into an Oscar-winning film. Antonio Salieri, imperial Kapellmeister and teacher of Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt, became European culture's permanent emblem of mediocrity.
An Orphan from Legnago
Salieri was born on 18 August 1750 in Legnago, south of Verona in the Republic of Venice. His first teachers were his older brother Francesco, a violinist who had studied with Giuseppe Tartini, and Giuseppe Simoni, organist of Legnago Cathedral. Between 1763 and 1764 both his parents died. A monastic uncle in Padua took him briefly; then, around 1765, a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo became his guardian, and in Venice he studied with the organist Giovanni Battista Pescetti and the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini.
Gassmann's Ward
The decisive intervention came from the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who was struck by the orphan's talent, brought him to Vienna on 15 June 1766 and paid for his education himself. Gassmann taught him Latin, Italian poetry, German, vocal composition and thoroughbass, and set him to translate Johann Fux's *Gradus ad Parnassum* during Latin lessons — counterpoint and grammar learned in the same exercise. At the Sunday salons of the Martinez family, Salieri acquired two more informal teachers: Christoph Willibald Gluck, who became his advocate, and the poet Metastasio, who taught him Italian prosody and declamation. Through Gassmann he also gained access to Emperor Joseph II's chamber music, and the Emperor's favour, which lasted until Joseph's death in 1790.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The Emperor's Composer
Salieri's first complete opera, *Le donne letterate* (1770), after Molière, opened a career of thirty-four years and more than thirty-five original stage works. *Armida* (1771), from Tasso, premiered on 2 June; *La fiera di Venezia* (1772) had characters singing in three languages. When Gassmann died on 21 January 1774, Salieri succeeded him as assistant director of Italian opera; he married Therese Helferstorfer that October, and for eighteen years he effectively controlled Italian-language opera in Vienna.
Joseph II sent him to Italy from 1778 to 1780, where *Europa riconosciuta* opened La Scala in Milan — the commission came to him after Gluck declined it and, with Gluck's approval, recommended him. *La Scuola de' gelosi* (1778) and *La grotta di Trofonio* (1785), the first opera buffa published in full score by Artaria, confirmed his standing. In Paris he produced *Les Danaïdes* (1784), initially passed off as Gluck's work with Salieri assisting and only later acknowledged as wholly his; it stayed on the Paris stage for over forty years. *Tarare* (1787) was conceived as the last word in reform opera, and Lorenzo Da Ponte's Italian version, *Axur, re d'Ormus* (1788), became his greatest international success. That same year he was appointed imperial Kapellmeister on the death of Giuseppe Bonno, a post he held until 1824.
Mozart: The Record
The two men circled each other. In 1781 Mozart complained to his father that "the only one who counts in the Emperor's eyes is Salieri," and warned of Italian factions: "You know those Italian gentlemen; they are very nice to your face!" At the 1786 composition contest in the Schönbrunn Orangery, Mozart was reckoned the loser. But the countervailing evidence is at least as strong. On becoming Kapellmeister in 1788, Salieri revived *Figaro* rather than mounting a new opera of his own. The two jointly composed the cantata *Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia* for the singer Nancy Storace. And Mozart's last surviving letter, of 14 October 1791, records taking Salieri to *The Magic Flute*, where "from the overture, to the last choir there was not a piece that didn't elicit a 'Bravo!' or 'Bello!' out of him." The poisoning rumour surfaced only decades after Mozart's death in 1791; it has been attributed partly to rivalry between the German and Italian schools of music. Salieri denied it vehemently and was, in his own account, deeply damaged by it.
The Teacher
His lasting influence ran through the classroom. Salieri was among the most sought-after teachers of his generation, and his pupils included Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Anton Eberl, the singer Caterina Canzi and Mozart's own younger son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart. All but the wealthiest were taught free — a deliberate repayment of Gassmann's kindness to a penniless orphan. He conducted Haydn's *The Creation* on 18 March 1808, the performance at which Haydn collapsed, and premiered Beethoven's first two piano concertos and *Wellington's Victory*.
Why Antonio Is Called a Genius
He is not, and honesty requires saying so plainly: nobody in music history ranks Salieri with Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven, and his own reputation faded so fast that his music had largely vanished from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868. But the popular verdict — that he was a mediocrity consumed by envy — is a fiction manufactured by Pushkin's 1831 "little tragedy" and industrialised by Shaffer's *Amadeus* (1979) and Forman's 1984 film, which made him a Machiavellian, Iago-like figure and won F. Murray Abraham an Academy Award.
The real man had two genuine and unusual gifts. The first was dramatic construction: *Les Danaïdes* held the Paris stage for four decades, *Tarare* and *Axur* travelled across Europe, and *Falstaff* (1799) has found new audiences in modern times. The *Twenty-Six Variations on La Folia di Spagna* (1815) has been called the most monumental set of orchestral variations before Brahms. The second was pedagogical — an ear for what a young composer needed, exercised on Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt at no charge. That is not the genius of invention. It is the genius of transmission, and the century of music that followed him ran through his rooms. He saw his own eclipse clearly: "Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity."
Legacy
Salieri lost his only son in 1805 and his wife in 1807, attempted suicide in November 1823, and suffered dementia for the last eighteen months of his life. He died in Vienna on 7 May 1825, aged 74, and his own Requiem in C minor, written in 1804, was performed for the first time at his memorial service on 22 June. A theatre in Legnago now bears his name, and his monument carries a poem by his pupil Joseph Weigl. Recordings by Cecilia Bartoli in 2003 and Diana Damrau in 2008 began the slow work of letting the music speak over the legend.
