Salieri vs Mozart?
Myth and truth of a rivalry

Antonio Salieri’s reputation in the music world is clouded. He is rumoured to have been a mediocre composer, and suspected of poisoning his rival, Mozart. During his lifetime Salieri was an immensely successful composer, described by peers as a likeable person. But is his music equal to that of Mozart? At the beginning of March a chamber concert with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker offers a chance to examine this question more closely.

“Mozart, I confess, I killed you!” Desperate cries are heard echoing throughout the vast stairwell, and the two servants standing outside their employer’s locked study look suitably shocked. Time and again Antonio Salieri can be heard accusing himself, until his servants break down the door. He later confesses his alleged crimes to a priest, describing them exhaustively.

Persistent myths

The myths are persistent. Even among his own contemporaries rumours were circulating about Salieri’s guilty conscience concerning Mozart. In 1830, only five years after the Italian composer’s death, Alexander Pushkin published a verse play that gave literary expression to the legend that Mozart had been poisoned. In 1898, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took this play as the starting point for an opera. And in 1979 Peter Shaffer’s play on the subject, Amadeus, received its world premiere in London. Five years later Miloš Forman’s film version of the play was released, a brilliant realization that uses the scene described above as its explosive opening sequence.

Envious enemies

The myth that Mozart was murdered has long been debunked by scholars. The thirty-five-year-old’s death during the night of 4/5 December 1791 was the result of either a rheumatic fever or of pharyngitis, a severe throat infection. It is also possible that the composer poisoned himself by drinking diluted mercury in an attempt to cure what may have been a syphilitic infection.

So why did both Pushkin and Shaffer treat Salieri as the villain of the piece? Part of the explanation can be found in the cult of the genius, which was especially fashionable during the Sturm und Drang period of the 1770s – the very time that Mozart was alive. This was an age that applied the term “original genius” to any artist who created his works without regard for tradition, someone who did not need to imitate models or to copy established forms. This aesthetic emerged in opposition to the formal constraints of the Baroque and Neoclassical doctrines, both of which judged artists according to fixed and timeless standards. The genius, by contrast, was not subservient to the dictates of mere craftsmanship, and drew inspiration from within. Such inimitable talent could not be learnt, meaning that the genius could never have any colleagues. Only admirers. Or envious enemies.

A successful career

Mozart was undoubtedly a genius. But who was Antonio Salieri? He was born in 1750 in Legnago, Upper Italy, and as a child learnt to play the violin and the piano. When his parents died, he was taken to Venice by a family friend. There he received lessons in singing and composition. In 1766, during a visit to Venice, the Viennese composer Florian Leopold Gaßmann noticed Salieri’s talent, and took the fifteen-year-old back to Austria as his pupil.

Salieri quickly made Vienna his home, marrying a local woman in 1775, and taking Austrian citizenship. His most important patron was Emperor Joseph II, who appointed him his chamber composer and, following Gaßmann’s death, music director of the Italian Opera in Vienna. By 1788 he had risen to the rank of Court Kapellmeister. Extremely hard-working, he was just as successful as a composer of sacred music as he was in the field of the music theatre. He wrote a total of thirty-nine operas. These were performed and enthusiastically received not only in Vienna but also in Milan, Paris, Rome and Venice.

In terms of social position, the freelance, impecunious Mozart was never a serious rival of Salieri, whose finances were on an immeasurably sounder footing. Salieri almost certainly never fought with Mozart, who was his junior by six years, and in fact appears to have lent him his active support. Salieri conducted performances of Mozart’s G minor Symphony K 550, and repeatedly performed his colleague’s works after the latter’s premature death in 1791. After a performance of Die Zauberflöte that Salieri attended, Mozart reported to his wife that his older colleague “listened and watched with the utmost attentiveness, and from the overture to the final chorus there wasn’t a single number that didn’t call forth a bravo or a bello from him”.

It was Salieri, too, who introduced Mozart to his most important librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, whom Salieri had lured to Vienna from Dresden in 1783. The first collaboration between Da Ponte and Salieri proved unsuccessful, however, and the composer turned to other librettists. Da Ponte’s libretto to Le nozze di Figaro had initially been intended for Salieri, but it was Mozart who ultimately set it to music. Much the same thing happened with Così fan tutte a few years later: Salieri abandoned the project after only two arias, and passed on the libretto to Mozart. And in 1791 Mozart was able to write La clemenza di Tito for the Prague coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia, Salieri having had to turn down the opportunity to set Metastasio’s words as a result of overcommitment.

Late justice

In his biography of Mozart, Wolfgang Hildesheimer wrote: “Salieri was an agreeable and apparently altogether conciliatory man, a serious practising musician and teacher, whose pupils included Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt.” Beethoven had composition lessons with Salieri and wrote a set of variations on an aria from Salieri’s opera Falstaff. He also dedicated his op. 12 Violin Sonatas to Salieri. In addition to Schubert and Liszt, Mozart’s own son, Franz Xaver, likewise studied with Salieri. Salieri did not fall out of fashion during his own lifetime. Goethe was full of praise for his music. And it was while he was studying medicine in Paris in 1822 that Berlioz was so taken by Salieri’s opera Les Danaïdes that he decided to devote his life to music. Even Wagner found much to admire in the Italian composer’s scores.

At the beginning of March, six young members of the Berliner Philharmoniker offer listeners the rare opportunity to make up their own minds about Salieri’s music. Following the season’s theme of Controversial!, they present an evening of works designed to compare and contrast the music of Mozart and Salieri. At the same time, the performers will focus on a particular feature of the music of eighteenth-century Vienna. During the reign of Joseph II, some of the most popular works were string quartets with a fugal final movement. This was a tradition developed by Johann Adolph Hasse, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Johann Joseph Fux, while Joseph Haydn’s pioneering op. 20 String Quartets raised the galant Divertimento a quattro to a whole new level through their final fugues.

March’s recital programme will open with Mozart’s contribution to this kind of string quartet: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor K 546. Four of Salieri’s lighter pieces will also be heard, his Scherzi strumentali di stile fugato. The Italian term strumentali indicates that this is instrumental music, while the word scherzo was used by Viennese Classical composers to refer to pieces that were quick, lively and carefree in character. In short, they were entertaining in the very best sense of the word, while still being written in a learned fugal style. The programme also features a string quartet fugue by Salieri and two other pieces by Mozart: his enchanting Horn Quintet, which he wrote for a family friend, the horn virtuoso Joseph Leutgeb, and the Third String Quintet in C major K 515, a piece whose fast movements bubble over with imagination, while the Andante is a heartfelt love duet for the first violin and the first viola.