Vienna, 1825: Shortly before his death, Salieri energetically repudiates the emerging rumour that he murdered Mozart. He beseeches a former student, composer Ignaz Moscheles, to tell the world that this talk of poisoning is nothing but maliciousness. In the wake of Salieri’s passing, however, this legend quickly put down roots. Alexander Pushkin authored the drama Mozart and Salieri, which was set to music later on by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it was then the British dramatist Peter Shaffer who ultimately brought the tradition to a head: Salieri as a talentless, pathologically envious adversary to Mozart’s genius. Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus, based on Shaffer’s eponymous play, begins with Salieri saying: “Mozart, forgive your assassin. I confess, I killed you.” Though all of these works are fictitious, their influence on how Antonio Salieri is viewed has persisted to this day. Central to Salieri’s biography was the untimely death of his parents. Raised in Legnago, he arrived at the imperial court in Vienna as a sixteen-year-old and set about laying the foundations of his success. Salieri went on to become Kapellmeister of the Imperial Chapel. The rise of nationalism was the root cause behind the anti-Salieri sentiment that set in during the 1820s and gave rise to the myth of the “evil Italian” scheming against the “German genius”, tarnishing Salieri’s sterling reputation and pushing his repertoire into relative obscurity.
In cooperation with Jürgen Partaj, director of the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle and creator of the festival SALIERI 2025, three mini-dramas have been commissioned from dramatists Thomas Perle, Lisa Wentz, and Miriam Unterthiner. These will reveal new perspectives on Antonio Salieri in celebration of his jubilee year and are to be presented by students of the Max Reinhardt Seminar at the Vienna Hofburgkapelle on 21 May, 4 June, and 11 June, followed by a performance at Schlosstheater Schönbrunn on 28 June.
