“I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.” Antonio Salieri is perhaps more famous as one of the protagonists in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus – where he is a jealous rival of Mozart’s – than he is as a composer in his own right. With a new television serialisation of Shaffer’s play by Joe Barton about to screen on Sky Atlantic, it’s time to explore just how mediocre a composer Salieri really was, the nature of the relationship between the two men, and how the myth that Salieri poisoned Mozart took hold.
Mozart was acclaimed as a child prodigy, but Salieri was no slouch in that department either. Born in 1750 in Legnano, in the Republic of Venice, the young Antonio was taught by his older brother, Francesco, twice running away from home to hear him perform violin concertos. Both of Salieri’s parents died while he was in his early teens. At the age of 16, he impressed the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, Hofkapellmeister to Emperor Joseph II, who took Salieri back to Vienna and was influential in his early successes there.
Le donne letterate, Salieri’s first opera, was premiered at the Burgtheater in 1770. A few years later, he was made court composer and director of the Italian opera. In 1788 Salieri became Hofkapellmeister, a position he held for 36 years. He was, therefore, one of the leading court composers by the time Mozart, dismissed from his Salzburg post in 1781, was trying to establish himself in Vienna.
Salieri was prolific, writing over 40 operas, religious and secular vocal works, serenades and concertos. After his death, his music fell quickly out of the repertoire although, ironically, Miloš Forman’s hit 1984 film of Shaffer’s play did inspire investigation into Salieri’s music. Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli devoted a lively album to his arias. In Milan, the Teatro alla Scala, which was inaugurated in 1778 with the premiere of Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta, restaged the opera in 2004 to mark the house’s reopening after major renovations.
The music is attractive and perfectly well composed, but lacks the last degree of genius, for want of a better word, that characterises Mozart at his very best.
While there was doubtless rivalry between the two – it must have been difficult for the senior composer to cope with a young pup coming in with radical new ideas – there’s no evidence of animosity between them.
Indeed, Mozart was anxious to earn Salieri’s approval, writing to his father, Leopold, in 1786, about Le nozze di Figaro: “I have just learned that Salieri was present and heard it with great attention, and also applauded it. So perhaps he will see that I am not altogether without talent.”
Of the premiere of Die Zauberflöte in September 1791, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Mozart’s first biographer, wrote: “Salieri listened with great attention and, when he saw Mozart, embraced him and said: ‘What a work of art! This is an opera worthy to be performed in the greatest theatres of the world.’”
A key plot point in Amadeus is Salieri anonymously commissioning Mozart to compose a Requiem Mass which Salieri intends to pass off as his own and have it performed at Mozart’s own funeral. When Mozart falls ill, Salieri urges him to continue writing, even taking dictation from the dying composer in a brilliantly written scene.
The truth is less scandalous. The Requiem was commissioned – anonymously – by a nobleman, Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted it performed on the first anniversary of the death of his wife, Anna. So where does the myth come from? It was Constanze, Mozart’s wife, who first put about the idea that Mozart was unaware of his commissioner's identity and that he believed he was writing the Requiem for his own funeral.
The cause of Mozart’s death is uncertain. He was only 35 years old and, until a few weeks before, had seemingly been in good health. There was no post-mortem and he was buried in an unmarked grave, so we’ll probably never know, but reports of his symptoms suggest natural causes linked to rheumatic fever, kidney failure or a streptococcal infection.
But in a 1798 interview, Constanze told Niemetschek that Mozart had said, “I am only too conscious… my end will not be long in coming: for sure, someone has poisoned me! I cannot rid my mind of this thought.” Was this simply a good marketing ploy to generate interest in the Requiem, which was about to be published in the completion by Mozart’s pupil, Franz Xaver Süßmayr?
Rather than Mozart composing a Requiem for his own funeral, it was Salieri himself who, in 1804, wrote a Requiem in C minor with the express instruction that it be performed at his own funeral. The autograph manuscript is headed, “Picciolo Requiem composto da me, e per me, Ant. Salieri, piccolissima creatura” [Little Requiem composed by me, and for me, Antonio Salieri, tiny creature].
Salieri died on 7th May 1825, and his “piccolo Requiem” was indeed played at his funeral on 22nd June. What had prompted this morbid act of forward planning? Possibly the circumstances of his teacher, Gassmann, who had failed to complete his own Requiem in time before he died in 1774, but also perhaps the fate of Mozart.
The myth that Salieri poisoned Mozart is a persistent one and the rumours greatly distressed Salieri, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1823, during which he reportedly confessed to the murder. When lucid again, he recanted this, as reported by his physician and student Ignaz Moscheles: “Although this miserable rumour has been spread, it is false – I never poisoned Mozart; all my life I have loved and respected him.”
But rivalry and rumour were fuel for literature, opera and film. Just five years after Salieri’s death, Alexander Pushkin wrote the short play Mozart and Salieri, one of his Little Tragedies and the only one of Pushkin’s plays to be performed during his lifetime. There are just three characters: Mozart, Salieri and a blind fiddler, a mute role.
Interestingly, both Pushkin and Shaffer refer to Mozart as a “vessel of God”. Pushkin’s Salieri declares “You, Mozart, are a god – and you don't know it. But I… I know.” Salieri is consumed by envy and poisons Mozart after lamenting that divine genius was granted to someone so frivolous.
Pushkin’s play was then set almost verbatim by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as a one-act opera in 1897, starring the great bass Feodor Chaliapin as Salieri. There are brilliant moments of classical pastiche, as well as quotations from Don Giovanni, Figaro and the Requiem. There’s a very good Chandos recording which inevitably featured a still from Amadeus on the cover with Tom Hulce (Mozart) and F Murray Abraham (Salieri).
The myth of Salieri poisoning Mozart returned spectacularly in Shaffer’s play and Forman’s film, which won eight Oscars. Hulce and Abraham were both nominated as Best Actor, Abraham triumphing… a rare example of Salieri besting Mozart. Now Barton’s screen adaptation will doubtless propagate the fable further.
“Let me be a composer! Grant me sufficient fame to enjoy it,” Shaffer’s Salieri declares. Salieri’s fame is destined to rest on fiction.
Joe Barton’s Amadeus premieres on Sky Atlantic from 21st December.
See upcoming performances of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
