Antonio Salieri

(1750–1825)

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Antonio Salieri was born on 18 August 1750 in the small town of Legnago, in what was then still part of the mainland Republic of Venice. He was taught the violin and harpsichord by his brother Francesco (a pupil of Tartini) but when he and his numerous siblings were orphaned in 1765 Giuseppe Mocenigo, a wealthy friend of his father, took young Antonio to Venice. There, he attracted the attention of the Bohemian composer Florian Gassmann who, in June 1766, took him to Vienna where he was befriended by Gluck and admitted to Emperor Joseph II’s musical establishment. He deputised for Gassmann as harpsichordist in the Burgtheater, and when Gassmann went on another visit to Italy in 1769 Salieri composed Le donne letterate, the first of his surviving operas, to a libretto by the young poet Giovanni Boccherini, originally intended for Gassmann. This was produced on 10 January 1770 and marked the beginning of a highly successful operatic career.

Between then and 1804 he wrote over forty operas, the great majority of them for
Vienna, but others for Milan, Venice, Rome, Munich, Paris and Trieste. During his long life he served under four Habsburg monarchs and held all the major posts in the Viennese musical ‘establishment’. He succeeded Gassmann as Kammer-Komponist and Kapellmeister of the Italian Opera in 1774, and Giuseppe Bonno as Hofkapellmeister in 1788. He was an active supporter of the Tonkünstler-Sozietät (the Viennese Musicians’ Benevolent Society, founded by Gassmann in 1771) and its President from 1788 to 1795, and was the first Director of Vienna’s first music conservatory, the Sing-Akademie, founded in 1817. He was also a distinguished teacher, whose pupils included Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Liszt.

There is no foundation for the ‘legend’ that he poisoned Mozart. Although poles apart as composers, they were colleagues, and shared a double-bill in the Palace of Schönbrunn in 1786, when the various problems of writing and stagingopera were discussed in Mozart’s singspiel, Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri’s divertimento teatrale, Prima la musica, poi le parole. There is also a letter that Mozart wrote on 14 October 1791 (less than two months before his death) to his wife, in which he describes how he took Salieri to his box in the Theater auf der Wieden for a performance of Die Zauberflöte, and how attentive and appreciative Salieri was: ‘There was not a single number that did not call forth from him a “bravo” or a “bello”.’

During the last twenty years of his life Salieri composed mostly sacred music for the court chapel, but the most significant exception was a set of Twenty-six Variations on ‘La folia di Spagna’, which dates from December 1815.

from notes by Robin Golding