Did Salieri really poison Mozart? — Antonio Salieri | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Historically, in that there is absolutely no evidence to support the notion, it has to be said that he did not. Poetically, in that his relationship with Mozart was beset by rivalry, there is a case for developing the idea and presenting it as an intriguing speculation. Alexander Pushkin was the first to make a drama out of it when, only five year’s after Salieri’s death, he wrote his Mozart and Salieri, which Rimsky-Korsakov set to music sixty-seven years later. Then, in 1971, there was Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, which Milos Forman made into a film in 1984. They are all based on the same theme - a highly distinguished composer so jealous of the surpassing genius of an uncouth upstart that he is driven to have him poisoned.

But there’s no smoke without fire.

It is true that, according to one source, Salieri confessed to the crime on his deathbed. According to another, more reliable witness, he dismissed the rumour as absurd, describing it as “malice, pure malice.” Certainly, he had reason to be resentful of Mozart, not least when the younger composer secured the commission for an opera to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II in Prague in 1791. Because of pressure of work, deputising for a former pupil at the Imperial Court Theatre in Vienna, Salieri had had to turn it down - which is how La Clemenza di Tito came to be written. And Salieri would not have forgotten that his Singspiel, Der Rauchfangkehrer, had been eclipsed by Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail ten years earlier.

Wasn’t that kind of thing, together with Mozart’s apparently effortless genius, motive enough?

It has to be understood that the idea of overwhelming God-given genius is an essentially romantic invention. Salieri might well have recognised Mozart’s exceptional qualities but no composer as highly placed in Vienna and as rich and as revered as Salieri in his day would have killed a conspicuously less successful colleague for his “genius.” The idea is as absurd as the delightful notion offered in Alfred Brendel’s recently published poetry collection, One Finger Too Many, that it wasn’t Salieri who poisoned Mozart but Beethoven disguised as Salieri, so that he could have exclusive rights on C minor!

So what was Salieri’s relationship with Mozart?

If one if the two composers had reason to be jealous of the other it was Mozart. Salieri, an Italian, had been appointed court composer and conductor at the opera in Vienna at the age of 24 and fourteen years later he became court Kapellmeister as well. At least until the death of Joseph II he had the position and the power. At the same time he was enormously successful in Paris, where Mozart failed. In Vienna they had to co-exist and, although Salieri did not go out of his way to help Mozart, he did conduct his music, including one of the last three symphonies, and - to Mozart’s great delight - he was generous in his praise of Die Zauberflöte.

What is Salieri’s music like?

The oversimplified answer is that it’s like Mozart’s without the magic. Although, as a follower of Gluck, Salieri was not a progressive composer, he and Mozart were clearly working in the same milieu, for the same audience and with the same materials, sometimes even the same librettist. Whatever Salieri did, it was with great skill and no little imagination. Sadly, however, in spite of all his achievements, within ten years of his death he was well on the way to being forgotten.

And why should he be remembered now?

No music as fluent and as entertaining as Salieri’s at its best, which includes his concertos and wind serenades as well as some of his operas, should be ignored. Apart from that, if we know nothing of the work of the composer who attracted pupils of the quality of Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt - among many others, like Hummel and Moscheles, who achieved fame in their day - we are missing something essential in our understanding of one of the most interesting and most fruitful periods in musical history.

Gerald Larner©