Antonio Salieri
Forget the hate-filled murderer of Mozart, says Alexandra Wilson; the real Salieri was an opera composer of considerable standing
Remembered almost exclusively as a supporting role in someone else’s biopic, Antonio Salieri really deserves a film in his own right. A workaday composer, living in the shadow of a genius; a dull establishment figure to Mozart’s bohemian freelancer – these are the clichés that film and fiction have passed down to posterity.
In fact, Salieri was an orphaned teenager who was ‘saved’ by the kindness of others, and who would ultimately find himself working for royalty, being courted by theatres all over Europe and associating with the most celebrated artistic figures of the era. Though the music textbooks have chosen to forget the fact, he was a composer of considerable historic significance, both through his own artistic reforms and through the influence he had on many of the major composers and singers of the early-19th century.
Salieri was born in 1750 in Legnago, a small town on the border between two Italian states, the Kingdom of Venice and the Duchy of Mantua. Details of his childhood are scant, but it is clear he grew up in a household where music was encouraged and that he showed early promise. It was fortunate indeed that when he lost his parents he was taken under the wing of a wealthy family acquaintance: one Giovanni Mocenigo, who took him to Venice – then an exceptionally vibrant and important operatic centre – for musical training. This led in turn to an even luckier break in the form of an introduction to the chamber composer to Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Florian Gassmann, who visited Venice regularly to write operas for the Carnival. Gassmann agreed to take the boy on as a pupil and musical apprentice, taking him back with him to Vienna.
Salieri soon became a recognised composer in his own right, composing six operas in the space of two years. Particularly popular and noteworthy was his Armida, based on Torquato Tasso’s libretto which, full of magic and romance in the time of the Crusades, would also inspire works by Lully, Handel, Gluck and, later, Rossini and Dvořák. Following Gassmann’s death in 1774, Salieri
By the 1780s, still in his 30s, he was the most important musician in the Austrian Empire
succeeded his teacher as court chamber composer and was also appointed director of the Italian Opera at the Nationaltheater.
Italian opera was something of a lingua franca in the late-18th century, an art form enjoyed and patronised by the aristocracy all over Europe. To have an Italian opera composer in his personal employ would have been a mark of prestige for a patron such as Joseph II, even if Salieri had left the Italian peninsula at a very young age, been influenced by a variety of national trends and wholeheartedly embraced Austrian musical life.
Salieri rose through the ranks at the Viennese court, taking on a succession of progressively more responsible roles. By the 1780s, still in his 30s, he was the most important musician in the Austrian Empire and held one of the top musical jobs in the world (Hofkapellmeister),
writing across all genres of music, organising court music-making, and acting as a singing teacher to the most important singers of the day.
However, a true cosmopolitan and frequent traveller, he was also well connected to theatres and musical communities all over Europe, his works being performed in cities as far apart as Lisbon and Moscow.
Between 1778 and ’83, when the new German genre of Singspiel became all the rage in Vienna, Salieri temporarily put his operatic activities on hold and began to explore opportunities further afield. He wrote an opera seria, L’europa riconosciuta, for the opening of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and followed it up with a comedy for Venice: La scuola de’ gelosi, which would enjoy immense success all over Europe. Later, an opportunity to write an opéra lyrique – Les Danaïdes – for the Opéra de Paris led to other prestigious commissions for the French capital.
Key to opening the doors to La Scala and the Paris Opéra for Salieri was Christoph Willibald Gluck, with whom the young composer had become friendly in Vienna. Gluck was a highly important figure in his career, not only in helping him to network but in securing work for him. Somewhat duplicitously, Gluck secured the Parisian commission for Les Danaïdes for himself, but with every intention of giving the work to Salieri – thereby raising the fee and securing for the young composer an entry into Parisian high society. (Marie
Antoinette herself was in the audience.)
Gluck was also a profound influence on Salieri’s musical style and approach to writing opera. The Germanbohemian composer is remembered today as a great operatic reformer, who made operas shorter, more engaging and dramatically more convincing, doing away with florid musical writing for its own sake. His influence is particularly strong in Salieri’s 1787 opera for Paris, Tarare, a radical work both in its libretto – an original subject by Beaumarchais with political bite – and in its score, which avoids traditional aria forms, instead using recitative and arioso passages in a flexible way designed to aid story-telling.
Eighteenth-century Italian opera was highly convention-bound. Opera seria and opera buffa each had their own distinctive conventions in terms of characterisation, aria types, structure and dramatic high points. Salieri was interested in breaking away from strict operatic conventions, and most of his works have labels such as ‘dramma giocoso’ or ‘dramma eroicomico’. He was also comfortable exploring other genres, including the ‘pasticcio’ and ‘pastorale’ and some of his works have very loose titles such as ‘divertimento teatrale’.
One genre in which he felt less at home, as a composer steeped in the Italian traditions, was the Singspiel, which interspersed light-hearted songs with spoken dialogue: Mozart’s The Magic
Flute is, of course, the best-remembered example. But Joseph II had invested in hiring an ensemble specifically to perform this sort of work and insisted Salieri try his hand at one. 1781’s Der Rauchfangkehrer, oder Die Unentbehrlichen Verräther ihrer Herrschaften aus Eigennutz (The Chimney Sweep, or The Indispensable Betrayers of Their Lordships out of Self-interest) was a cross between a Singspiel and an opera buffa. Fittingly, the subject matter, about a romance between an Italian chimney sweep and a German cook, allowed the composer much opportunity to muse wittily on the differences between the two national characters.
Salieri’s works were based on a wide range of literary sources. Ancient legend, filtered through the pen of the famous librettist Metastasio, proved a fruitful source of inspiration for serious works such as Semiramide (1782) – a subject set by many other composers, most famously Rossini. However, Salieri also wrote contemporary comedies of manners, based on mix-ups or mistaken identities, some of which bear distinct resemblances to the Mozart-da Ponte operas. (Indeed, Salieri worked regularly with poet and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, acting as an early mentor to him, and the relationship between the two men was warm.)
La grotta di Trofonio (1785), for instance, revolves around two couples whose personalities are reversed by a magician, though order is restored in the end.
La scuola de’ gelosi (1778), a work about romantic intrigue across the class divide, is not only reminiscent in subject of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro but also cast some of the same stars. Some of the subjects of Salieri’s operas are decidedly quirky and oddly forward-looking, such as Il mondo alla rovescia (The topsy-turvy world), in which the roles of the men and women on an island are reversed, both in terms of occupations and conventional behaviour. Salieri was also one of the first composers to write an opera based on a play by Shakespeare, composing a Falstaff in 1799 that was fairly popular in its day, but has been eclipsed by Verdi’s version of 1893.
It is important to remember, however, that Salieri was writing in a context where works were written at great speed and
He was one of the first composers to write an opera based on a play by Shakespeare
rarely reprised. In total he wrote more than 40 operas and inevitably there was some unevenness in quality to them: some were based on weak librettos and others were hastily staged. Salieri’s composing career ultimately petered out in 1804 with an unsuccessful Singspiel set on an American plantation whose music was sub-par and whose title is now unprintable. But that was by no means the end of his career.
As the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Salieri remained highly active, busying himself with running court musicmaking, composing sacred music and conducting (apparently becoming furious if a rival conductor organised another concert on the same night). He had huge numbers of students, many of whom he taught for free in tribute to the generosity of his patron Gassmann, and among them were many famous names: Beethoven, Czerny, Meyerbeer, Schubert and the young Liszt included.
Sadly, he ended his days mentally unstable and confused, rambling incoherently and resorting to self-harm. It was a sorry end for a man who had been so highly productive and helped so many.