In Vienna in the late 1780s, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart mentioned several "cabals" of Salieri concerning his new opera
Così fan tutte. As Mozart's music became more popular over the decades, Salieri's music was largely forgotten. At the beginning of the 19th century, increasing
nationalism led to a tendency to transfigure the
Austrian Mozart's
genius, while the
Italian Salieri was given the role of his evil
antagonist. Albert Lortzing's Singspiel Szenen aus Mozarts Leben LoWV28 (1832) uses the cliché of the jealous Salieri trying to hinder Mozart's career. In 1772, Empress
Maria Theresa commented on her preference of Italian composers over
Germans like Gassmann, Salieri or
Gluck. While Italian by birth, Salieri had lived in imperial Vienna since he was 16 years old and was regarded as a German composer.
The biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer believes that Mozart's suspicions of Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of the Princess of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead because of his reputation as a singing teacher. In the following year Mozart once again failed to be selected as the Princess's piano teacher.
Later, when Mozart's
Le nozze di Figaro was not well received by either the Emperor Joseph II or by the public, Mozart blamed Salieri for the failure. "Salieri and his tribe will move heaven and earth to put it down",
Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter Nannerl. But at the time of the premiere of
Figaro, Salieri was busy with his new
French opera
Les Horaces. Thayer believes that the intrigues surrounding the failure of
Figaro were instigated by the poet Giovanni Battista Casti against the court poet,
Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the
Figaro libretto.
In addition, when da Ponte was in
Prague preparing the production of Mozart's setting of his
Don Giovanni, the poet was ordered back to Vienna for a royal wedding for which Salieri's
Axur, re d'Ormus would be performed. Obviously, Mozart was not pleased by this.
There is, however, far more evidence of a cooperative relationship between the two composers than one of real enmity. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, he revived
Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own, and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even composed a cantata for voice and piano together, called
Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia, which was celebrating the return to stage of the singer
Nancy Storace. This work has been
lost, although it had been printed by
Artaria in 1785. Mozart's
Davide penitente K.469 (1785), his piano concerto in E flat major K.482 (1785), the clarinet quintet K.581 (1789) and the great Symphony in G minor K.550 had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who supposedly conducted a performance of it in 1791. In his last surviving letter from October 14 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he collected Salieri and
Catharina Cavalieri in his carriage and drove them both to the opera, and about Salieri's attendance at his opera
Die Zauberflöte K 620, speaking enthusiastically:
"He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was no piece that didn't elicit a bravo or bello out of him [...]."
Salieri's health declined in his later years, and he was hospitalized shortly before his death. It was shortly after he died that gossip first spread that he had confessed to Mozart's murder on his deathbed. Salieri's two nurses, Gottlieb Parsko and Georg Rosenberg, as well as his family doctor Joseph Röhrig, attested that he never said any such thing. At least one of these three people was with him throughout his hospitalization.
Within a few months of Salieri's death in 1825,
Aleksandr Pushkin wrote his "little tragedy"
Mozart and Salieri (1831) as a dramatic study of the sin of
envy. Russian composer
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov adapted Pushkin's play as an
opera of the same name in 1898. A popular perpetuation of the story was in
Peter Shaffer's play
Amadeus (1979) and the
Oscar-winning 1984 film directed by
Miloš Forman based upon it.
Salieri was portrayed in the film by
F. Murray Abraham, who won the
Academy Award for Best Actor. Salieri is characterized as both in awe of and insanely resentful towards Mozart, going so far as to renounce
God for blessing his adversary. Salieri's later hopitalization is portrayed as a stay in a
mental hospital, where he announces himself as "the Patron Saint of mediocrity".
These rumors are also alluded to in a
spoof opera entitled
A Little Nightmare Music: an opera in one irrevocable act, by
P.D.Q. Bach. In the opera, Salieri attempts to
poison an
anacronistic Shaffer but is bumped by a "clumsy oaf", which causes him to inadvertently poison Mozart instead and spill wine on his favorite coat.
