Overture: La Scuola de’ gelosi

If Salieri is remembered at all these days it is for something he didn’t do. While it might make good opera (as in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri) or good theatre (as in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) or good cinema (as in the Milos Forman film based on the Shaffer play) to accuse Salieri of being so obsessed by his jealousy of Mozart’s genius that he was driven to poison him, there is absolutely no historical basis for any such allegation. Indeed, if either of them had reason to be jealous it was Mozart, who was clearly the better composer but who enjoyed nothing like Salieri’s wealth or official status in the Imperial Court in Vienna.

As an Italian working in Vienna, however, Salieri did much to establish the Viennese classical style, which had a significant Italian dimension to it - as the young Beethoven acknowledged when he went to Salieri for lessons in Italian word-setting in the 1790s. His music is unmistakably of its place and of its time. Always competently written, at its best it sounds like Mozart on a day when his genius wasn’t all there. The Overture to La Scuola de’ gelosi (The School for Jealousy), a comic opera written for Teatro San Moisè in Venice in 1778, is a characteristic example. Its bustling beginning instantly reminds you of Mozart in a similar situation, in the Overture to Cosi fan tutte perhaps, and the melody that enters a little later on a solo oboe is an aptly chosen lyrical contrast. But, whereas Mozart would have developed this material, Salieri merely marks time until he can gracefully recapitulate it to complete a short but perfectly formed ternary construction.