Salieri slandered?

Synopsis

Today is the birthday of Antonio Salieri, one of the most unjustly maligned composers in history.

The successful stage play and movie Amadeus have helped to repeat the notorious charge that jealous 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Salieri was directly or indirectly responsible for Mozart’s early death. Historians have acquitted Salieri of this crime, but more people are familiar with the fiction than the facts.

The truth is that Salieri was often quite friendly to Mozart during his lifetime, and after Mozart’s death served as a music teacher to his talented son, Franz Xaver Mozart. The long-lived Salieri also gave lessons in the Italian style to Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt — surely signs of a nature more generous than jealous.

Salieri was born in Legnano, Italy in 1750. He came in Vienna in 1766, when he was 16 years old, and Vienna remained his home until the end of his life. A protégé of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, Salieri even accompanied that very musical monarch, who played the cello, at royal chamber music sessions. As a composer, Salieri enjoyed imperial patronage from his arrival in Vienna until 1800, a period of some 35 years.

Some of the operas Salieri wrote for Vienna have been revived and recorded in our time. He wrote over 40 of them, including The Talisman — a comic opera composed to a text by Mozart’s favorite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponti.

Music Played in Today's Program

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 25; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; Fantasy 900 1791

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825): La Locandiera Overture; London Mozart Players; Matthias Bamert, conductor; Chandos 9877

On This Day

Births

• 1750 - Italian opera composer Antonio Salieri, in Legnago (near Verona)

• 1849 - French composer Benjamin Godard, in Paris

• 1893 - Canadian composer and conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, in Mimico, Ontario

Deaths

• 1942 - Austrian composer Erwin Schulhoff, 48, in a German concentration camp in Wülzburg

Premieres

• 1820 - Schubert: opera Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp) in Vienna

• 1912 - Schreker: opera Der Ferne Klang (The Distant Sound), in Frankfurt at the Opernhaus

• 1938 - Britten: Piano Concerto, with the composer as soloist, at a Proms Concert conducted by Sir Henry Wood;

• 1956 - Henry Brant: On the Nature of Things, for spatially grouped instruments and strings, in Bennington, Vermont

• 1966 - Ulysseys Kay: Markings (dedicated to the late Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld), at the Meadow Brook Music Festival in Rochester, Michigan

Others

• 1906 - Gustav Mahler conducts the first of two performances of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro in Salzburg, Austria, during a Mozart Festival that also included Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte conducted by Richard Strauss.