Symphony in D major “La Veneziana”

When Salieri is remembered these days it is more often than not for something he didn’t do. The accusation that Salieri was so obsessed by his jealousy of Mozart’s genius that he was driven to poison him might might make good literature (as in Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri) or good opera (as in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri based on the Pushkin) or good theatre (as in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) or good cinema (as in the Milos Forman film based on the Shaffer play). There is, however, absolutely no foundation for such an allegation in historical fact. 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, 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 Symphony in D major (known as “La Veneziana” for no reason more significant than that it was published in Venice) is a characteristic example. The style and even some of the melodic material of the Allegro assai immediately bring Mozart to mind. If, in its lack of a development section, the construction seems flimsy for the first movement of a Viennese Symphony it is only fair to remember that it was written not for the concert hall but as the first part of a three-part overture to a comic opera, La scuola de’ gelosi, first performed at carnival time in Venice in 1779. The charmingly melodious, similarly Mozartian Andante grazioso leads directly into a cheerfully uncomplicated Presto.