“Salieri, by the way, was quite gregarious. His most cherished entertainment was amidst the circle of his students.” This assessment in an 1825 obituary for Antonio Salieri1 refers not only to Salieri’s composing students such as Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Giacomo Meyerbeer, or Johann Nepomuk Hummel, but in equal measure to those individuals whose vocal training had been close to Antonio Salieri’s heart throughout his life. Over the entirety of his long Viennese career, Salieri taught singers of all ages, vocal ranges, and levels—and even so, this comprehensive work as a vocal pedagogue has so far remained an under-illuminated footnote in the biography of this versatile artist. His students included ambitious “dilettantes” from Viennese high society as well as singers with ongoing careers who sought to perfect their art and still others who stood at the very beginning of their vocal training. Salieri is also said to have supported the advancement of especially talented young people free of charge, as described by his first biographer Ignaz von Mosel:
“Salieri had vowed to pass on without recompense that which had been given freely to him by Gassmann, his second father and master. He hence not only taught young talents who sought to make their living from music but also distributed to impoverished musicians the fees he received for his tutelage of noble and wealthy personages.”2
Antonio Salieri himself had received a comprehensive musical education as well as initial vocal instruction as a boy in his hometown of Legnago followed by vocal training under Ferdinando Pacini, a tenor in the Capella di San Marco in Venice.3 The question of when and where he gathered his initial experience as a voice teacher has seen little research thus far. It is known, however, that the 24-year-old Salieri, following his Viennese benefactor Florian Gassmann’s untimely death, assumed responsibility for the vocal training of Gassmann’s young daughters Anna Barbara and Therese, whom he guided to become professional singers. The research literature names these two artists as Salieri’s first students—and they were soon followed by others such as Catarina Cavalieri and Anna Milder-Hauptmann. The coloratura soprano Catarina Cavalieri became a favourite singer of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, who wrote the part of Konstanze in his Die Entführung aus dem Serail specifically for her, while Anna Milder-Hauptmann is remembered for premièring the role of Leonore in all three versions of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio. Among Salieri’s successful male students were the tenors Julius Cornet and Anton Haizinger as well as the bass Joseph Seipelt. Thanks to Salieri’s high standard of training and good artistic connections, these and other singers succeeded in establishing careers in Austria and abroad as part of which many of them celebrated major successes on Europe’s operatic and concert stages.
If concert reviews from back then are any indication, Salieri’s overarching objective as a voice teacher would seem to have been the cultivation of sonorous, agile, and flexible voices that were balanced in all registers along with the refinement of declamation, verbal clarity, and dramatic expressivity. Interesting in a methodological sense, moreover, is that Salieri went beyond voice lessons to organise regular performing opportunities—concerts that he himself led—for his adult students at that era’s very popular musical evenings in the homes of Viennese high society.
On the whole, Antonio Salieri seems to have prioritised comprehensive musical education geared to providing his students with access to a broad professional spectrum later on, not least as successful voice teachers in their own right. The baritone Joseph Mozatti, for example, made a name for himself as the teacher of Karoline Unger and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, both of whom came to number among the influential singers of their day. Joseph Seipelt, on the other hand, established a singing and music school for children in Vienna. Seipelt was probably emulating Antonio Salieri’s own example, for close to the end of his artistically and pedagogically fulfilled life, Salieri had initiated and established a choir school under the aegis of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Salieri’s school proved to be a lasting pedagogical impulse, seeing as it would ultimately evolve into what is now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Against this backdrop, the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education will be taking the 200th anniversary of its namesake’s death as an opportunity to hold a half-day symposium on Friday, 9 May 2025 that will investigate Salieri as a vocal pedagogue, historically contextualising his voice training method as well as analysing its influence on present-day considerations and approaches relating to vocal pedagogy.
- F. C. Weidmann, “Nekrolog. Anton Salieri, k.k. Hof-Capellmeister,” in Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, 27 August 1825 p. 859.
- Ignaz von Mosel, Über das Leben und die Werke des Anton Salieri. Vienna. J.B. Wallishausser, 1827 p. 209f.
- Rudolph Angermüller, Antonio Salieri. Sein Leben und seine weltlichen Werke unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner ‚großen‘ Opern. Teil II, 1. Vita und weltliche Werke. Munich. Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1974.
