Forget the hate-filled murderer of Mozart, says Alexandra Wilson; the real Salieri was an opera composer of considerable standing
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
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 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
