Paul Roper considers the music behind the myth.
How well known would Antonio Salieri have been without the supposed Mozart murder connection, a story that predated Amadeus, the play and movie by more than 150 years and was the subject of contemporary gossip in Vienna during his lifetime?
Salieri’s supposed self-confession, in 1823, simply added fuel to a slow-burning, low-intensity fire. As to how much weight it should carry, let’s just say that dementia was probably far less understood in Biedermeier Vienna than it is today. Salieri died 200 years ago this year, on 7 May 1825, and we’re honouring the occasion on 2MBS Fine Music Sydney throughout the anniversary month.
There is much more to Salieri’s music than is implied by the ‘Patron Saint of Mediocrities’ tag that Schaffer’s script assigns him. Despite having lived in Vienna since the age of 16 (in 1766), Salieri followed the trajectory typical of Italian composers of the time, focusing mainly on opera.
He composed few orchestral works, mainly concertos and mainly from the 1770s. Chamber music doesn’t feature substantially in his list of works and the solo keyboard is completely absent. Was Salieri consciously vacating the instrumental field, realising that he couldn’t compete with the innovations and popularity of Haydn and Mozart in these genres? Or did he simply not have the time?
Whatever the reason, opera ruled. Salieri composed more than 40, in three languages. He directed the Italian opera in Vienna from 1774 (aged 24) until 1792. He was the protégé of Gluck, which gave him entrée to the Paris operatic scene in the 1780s. He wrote the opera that inaugurated La Scala in Milan in 1778. Mozart’s famous collaborator, Lorenzo da Ponte, was Salieri’s librettist for four of the operas.
He appeared on a double bill with Mozart in a command performance for the Hapsburg Emperor, Joseph II: Mozart’s Die Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario, K486) went up against Prima la Musica, poi le Parole (First the music, then the words), a satire about the relative importance of music and text in vocal music in a debate that stretched back at least to Monteverdi’s time. If all that amounts to mediocrity, it surely is a mediocrity that many of Salieri’s contemporaries would have been only too pleased to claim.
Gluck, the leading opera composer in Vienna at the time, was one of the two musical mentors in Salieri’s career. The first was Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729-1774), a Bohemian-born Vienna-based composer who discovered the orphaned teenage Salieri in Venice, recognised his talent and arranged to take him into his household as a pupil.
Through Gassmann’s court connections Salieri also came to the attention of future Emperor Joseph II, who was to remain a steadfast supporter during his reign (1780-1790), as were his successors. Salieri’s first few operas, all in the new lighter opera buffa genre, were composed under Gassmann’s guidance.
In 1771 Gassmann founded a charity to support the families of deceased musicians. Probably as an act of gratitude Salieri remained associated with it throughout his life. He was known for his generosity, teaching many of his pupils in later years at no charge.
It was Gassmann who introduced him to the then 52-year-old Gluck and, at only 17 Salieri was at the harpsichord in the premiere of Gluck’s Alceste on 26 December 1767. Salieri’s first opera seria, Armida (1771), closely reflects Gluck’s own musical language and aesthetic ideals. The two remained very close, to the extent that Gluck even delegated an opera commission to Salieri.
After Gluck’s huge successes with his operas in Paris in the 1770s he was approached in 1781 to write another. By this time his health was not good (he’d suffered two strokes), so he entrusted the task in full to Salieri. This plan became public only by ‘drip-feed’: at first it was thought that Gluck would compose it, then word got around that master and pupil would share the work, and only eventually was it disclosed that the music would be all Salieri’s.
This was a massive responsibility for a young composer unknown in Paris. But Les Danaïdes (1784) was a resounding triumph, the opening night takings being sufficient to cover the cast’s wages for a month. So completely had Salieri embraced the demanding French operatic style and expectations, as reimagined and energised by Gluck, that he was invited to create two more operas for Paris later in the 1780s.
Salieri continued to produce Italian opera until 1804 and remained in the post of Capellmeister (which he’d attained in 1788) until 1824, the year before his death.
In 1808 he conducted The Creation in what was to be Haydn’s last public appearance (he was too ill to stay for the whole work). Salieri’s later years were devoted to vocal chamber music for social occasions (think Rossini’s Sins of Old Age), to revising and retouching his operas and to teaching: his pupils included Beethoven, Schubert, Meyerbeer, Hummel, Liszt, Moscheles and Franz Xaver Mozart.
A highlight was a celebration, on 16 June 1816, of his 50 years of service to the court in Vienna; this combined ceremonial public recognition with a gathering of his students, who performed their compositions in his honour. Despite declining physical health Salieri, who was cared for at home by his daughters, seems to have retained his cognitive abilities until 1823, when a terrifying and involuntary hospital admission precipitated severe mental decline for the last 18 months of his life. His own Requiem (1804) accompanied his funeral.
And the Mozart association? It’s complicated. Certainly there are plentiful references in Mozart’s correspondence from Vienna with his father to the Italian ‘party’ (faction, cabal) in the musical establishment that he believed was acting against his interests. In fairness, though, these started in 1768 when intrigues supposedly prevented the 12-year-old’s La Finta Semplice (K51) from being staged, so Salieri is hardly the only target.
Salieri’s court connections – the musicologist H C Robbins Landon called him ‘the arch-intriguer’ – gave him access that Mozart did not have. On the other hand, we know that Mozart invited Salieri to a production of The Magic Flute (13 October 1791), even taking him to the theatre in his coach. And a recently rediscovered ‘party piece’ from 1785 (Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, K477a) is a joint composition by Mozart, Salieri and one other, celebrating the return to health of a favourite singer: Nancy Storace, the first Susanna in Figaro.
So, competitors certainly; collaborators sometimes; mutually respectful. But not what the rumours said.
You can find our bicentenary tributes to Salieri on
- Sunday 4 May (Sunday Special, 3.00pm), including music by Gluck, Gassmann, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert
- Wednesdays 7 and 14 May (Fine Afternoon: A Cosmopolitan Composer, 2.00pm)
- Wednesday 21 May (At the Opera, 8.00pm): Armida
- Saturday 24 May (Saturday Matinee, 2.30pm): his Requiem and Passion.