Raised in a prosperous family of merchants, Salieri studied violin and harpsichord with his brother Francesco, who was a student of Giuseppe Tartini. After the early death of his parents, he moved to Padua, then to Venice, where he studied thoroughbass with Giovanni Battista Pescetti. There he met Florian Leopold Gassmann in 1766, who invited him to attend the court of Vienna and there trained him in composition based on Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum. He remained in Vienna for the remainder of his life, and in 1774, after Gassmann's death, Salieri was appointed court composer by Emperor Joseph II, and Imperial Royal Kapellmeister in 1788, a post which he held till 1824. He was president of the "Tonkünstler-Societät" (society of musical artists) from 1788 to 1795, vice-president after 1795, and in charge of its concerts until 1818.
He attained an elevated social standing, and was frequently associated with other celebrated composers like Joseph Haydn or Louis Spohr. He had important role in 19th century classical music: he taught famous composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Franz Liszt, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Schubert and Franz Xaver Süssmayr. He also taught Mozart's younger son, Franz Xaver.
Salieri is buried in the Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof (today Zentralfriedhof) in Vienna, Austria. At his funeral service his own Requiem in C minor - composed in 1804 - was performed for the first time. His monument is adorned by a poem written by Joseph Weigl, one of his pupils:
Rest in peace! Uncovered by dust
eternity shall bloom for you.
Rest in peace! In eternal harmonies
your spirit now is dissolved.
He expressed himself in enchanting notes,
now he is floating to everlasting beauty.
Works
- Main article: List of compositions by Antonio Salieri
During his time in Vienna, Salieri acquired great prestige as a composer and conductor, particularly of opera, but also of chamber and sacred music. The most successful of his more than 40 operas included Armida (1771), La scuola de' gelosi (1778), Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), Les Danaïdes (1784), which was first presented as a work of Gluck's, Tarare (1787), Axur, Re d'Ormus (1788), Palmira, Regina di Persia (1795), and Falstaff o sia Le tre burle (1799). He wrote comparatively little instrumental music, including two piano concertos and a concerto for organ written in 1773, a concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra (1774), a set of 26 variations on La Follia di Spagna (1815) and several serenades for winds.
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, and 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.
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.
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.
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.
There is far more evidence of a cooperative atmosphere between the two composers than for a real enmity. 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 has been 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) and 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 [...]"
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.
After Salieri's death in 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin's drama Mozart i Salieri (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 September 24, 2002 with an additional 20 minutes of footage).
In addition to the allegations of murder, the movie also portrays Salieri as a mediocre composer, an intriguer, and a blasphemer. In real life, 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.
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. Another reason for a 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.
Links
- Salieri: Truth or Fiction
- Mozart or Salieri? Take this quiz to see if you can tell the difference between their music.
References
- Rudolph Angermüller, Antonio Salieri 3 Vol. (München 1971-74)
- Rudolph Angermüller, Antonio Salieri. Fatti e Documenti (Legnago 1985)
- Volkmar Braunbehrens, Salieri, ein Musiker im Schatten Mozarts (München 1989), English translation entitled Maligned Master - the Real Story of Antonio Salieri (München 1992)
- A. Della Corte, Un italiano all'estero: Antonio Salieri (Torino 1936)
- V. Della Croce/F. Blanchetti, Il caso Salieri (Torino 1994)
- I. F. Edler v. Mosel, Über das Leben und die Werke des Anton Salieri (Vienna 1827)
- John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (Chicago 1998)
- Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Salieri: Rival of Mozart (Kansas City 1989)