Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri (Legnago, August 18, 1750 - Vienna, May 7, 1825) was an Italian composer of sacred, classical and operatic music, conductor and music teacher.

He was born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, and spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg Monarchy in Vienna. He was a pivotal figure in the development of opera at the end of the XVIII century . As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann and a protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck, he was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. He helped develop and shape many of the features of the operatic compositional vocabulary, and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers.

Appointed director of Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 to 1792, he dominated Italian-language opera in Vienna. During his career, he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Paris, Rome, and Venice, and his dramatic works were performed widely throughout Europe during his lifetime. As Austrian Imperial Kapellmeister from 1788 to 1824, he was responsible for music in the court chapel and the attached school. Even when his works ceased to be performed and he wrote no new operas after 1804, he remained one of the most important and sought after teachers of his generation, and his influence was felt in all aspects of life. Vienna music. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Eberl, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart are among the most famous of his students.

Salieri's music slowly disappeared from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868 and was rarely heard after that period until a revival of his fame at the turn of the century XX. This revival stemmed from the fictional portrayal of Salieri in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979) and its eponymous 1984 film version. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death in 1791 at the age of 35 years was followed by rumors that he and Salieri had been bitter rivals and that Salieri had poisoned the younger composer. However, it has been suggested that this is false and it is likely that they were, at least, mutually respectful companions.

Biography

Early Years

Antonio Salieri was born on August 18, 1750, the son of Antonio Salieri, who was a shoemaker by trade, and his wife, Anna Maria. He began his musical studies in his hometown of Legnago; He was first tutored at home by his older brother Francesco (a former student of the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini), and received additional lessons from the organist of the Legnago Cathedral, Giuseppe Simoni, a student of Father Giovanni Battista Martini. Salieri remembered little of his childhood. in later years, except the passion for sugar, reading and music. He twice ran away from home to listen to his older brother play violin concertos in neighboring churches on holidays (resulting in losing his beloved sugar) and recounted being reprimanded by his father after failing to say hello to a local priest with all due respect. He responded to the rebuke by saying that he disliked the priest's organ because it had an inappropriate theatrical style. Sometime between 1763 and 1764, both parents and an unnamed brother died, so a monk in Padua took him in briefly and then, for For reasons unknown in 1765 or 1766, he became a pupil of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo (which Giovanni is unknown), a member of the powerful and well-connected Mocenigo family. It is possible that Salieri and Mocenigo's father were friends or business associates, but this is not clear. While living in Venice, he continued his musical studies with the organist and opera composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti. Then, after his sudden death, he studied with the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini (or Pasini). It was through Pacini that Salieri came to the attention of the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, impressed with the talent of his protégé and concerned for the boy's future, took the young orphan to Vienna, where he conducted and personally paid for the rest of the his music education.

Salieri and Gassmann arrived in Vienna on June 15, 1766. Gassmann's first act was to bring Salieri to the Italian Church to consecrate his teaching and service to God, an event that left a deep mark on him for the rest of his life. his life. Salieri's education included instruction in poetry in Latin and Italian by Father Pietro Tommasi, instruction in the German language, and European literature. His musical studies revolved around vocal composition and figured bass. Her training in music theory in harmony and counterpoint was based on Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, which Salieri translated during every Latin lesson. As a result, she continued to live with Gassmann even after the marriage. of the latter, an arrangement that lasted until the year of Gassmann's death and Salieri's own marriage in 1774. Few of Salieri's compositions have survived from this early period. In his old age, he hinted that these works were destroyed on purpose or had been lost, with the exception of a few works for the church. Among these sacred works survives a Mass in C major written without "Gloria". and in the old a cappella style (presumably for one of the church's penitential seasons) and dated 2 August 1767. A complete opera composed in 1769 (presumably as a climactic study) The Vestal has also been lost.

Starting in 1766, Gassmann introduced Salieri to the daily chamber music performances held at Emperor Joseph II's dinner. Salieri quickly impressed the emperor, and Gassmann was instructed to bring his student as many times as he wanted. This was the beginning of a relationship between the monarch and the musician that lasted until the emperor's death in 1790. Salieri met Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known as Metastasio, and Christoph Willibald Gluck during this period in the Sunday morning salons at the Martínez family home. Metastasio had an apartment there and participated in the weekly meetings. Over the next several years, Metastasio gave Salieri informal instruction in prosody and recitation of Italian poetry, and Gluck became an informal adviser, friend, and confidant. It was toward the end of this extensive period of study that Gassmann was called for a new opera commission and a slot in the theater program allowed Salieri to make his debut as a completely original opera buffa composer. He composed the first complete opera of his during the winter and carnival season of 1770; Le Donne letterate and was based on Wise Women by Molière with a libretto by Giovanni Gastone Boccherini, dancer of the court ballet and brother of the composer Luigi Boccherini. The modest success This opera launched Salieri's operatic career at the age of 34 as a composer of more than 35 original dramas.

An opera of his to open La Scala

Thus began a brilliant career that would have led him to become permanently Kapellmeister at the Habsburg court (although he only held that position from 1778 to 1790) had it not been for his preference for the role of composer and teacher in the same Court. To his early operas—Le donne letterate (Le donne letterate) of 1770 and Armida of the following year (his first lasting success) —, is followed by the composition of the opera that established him on the musical scene of the time, L'Europa riconosciuta, commissioned by the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria and which was performed at the inauguration, on August 3, 1778, from the Nuovo Regio Ducal Theater in Milan (current Teatro de La Scala). It should be noted that the same opera was used for the reopening of the theater on December 7, 2004 after a long period of restoration.

Salieri, who had met Metastasio and Haydn, with whom he was a close friend, in Venice, traveled extensively during his life to follow the performances of his many operas; that is why he lived for a time in Paris (where he met Gluck, Piccinni and Hasse), Milan, Venice and Rome. He was one of the most prolific authors of both chamber and sacred music as well as "Italian-style" operas of his time.

Last years

At the age of sixty-three, Salieri alternated his classes with a position in the Vienna Orchestra. There, on December 8, 1813, at a charity concert for the soldiers wounded in the battle of Hanau, together with Hummel, Meyerbeer, Louis Spohr, Ignaz Moscheles, Domenico Dragonetti and Andreas Romberg, he was part of a large group of musicians. of the orchestra directed by an old disciple of his, Ludwig van Beethoven. The marathon repertoire included the premieres of various works by Beethoven himself, including the Seventh Symphony and Wellington's Victory.

In the last years of his life, Salieri saw his health suddenly and irreversibly deteriorate. He was blinded and spent the last years of his life confined to a hospital.

Salieri is buried in the central cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) in Vienna. The legend attributes to Schubert, his favorite student, the direction of the Requiem that Salieri himself had written some time ago for his own death. However, it is highly unlikely that the Austrian took the lead on that occasion.

Work

Salieri composed thirty-nine works for the theater. At the end of 2015, the German musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann discovered the famous, considered legend, cantata Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia. Composed in 1789 for the soprano Nancy Storace, it would be the only work written jointly by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Salieri, on a text by the common opera lyricist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Among his instrumental compositions, two pianoforte concertos and an organ concerto written in 1773 stand out; two symphonies, La veneziana (with parts used in the overtures of two operas) and Il Giorno Onomastico , both written during his youth in Venice; a concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra in 1774; a triple concerto for violin, oboe and cello; a set of twenty-six variations on La Follia di Spagna (1815), with violin and harp soloists, written as instrumentation examples; and various serenades among which it is extremely important to name Armonia per un tempio Della notte.

Relationship with Mozart

It happened in the years around 1790 that Mozart, then at the height of fame, accused Salieri, whose popularity was declining, of plagiarism and of wanting to kill him. According to historian Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Mozart's suspicions may have originated in an episode that occurred ten years earlier, when Mozart saw Salieri take away the position of music teacher for the Princess of Württemberg.

When Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro initially received a negative opinion from both the public and the emperor himself, the composer accused Salieri of the failure and of having boycotted the premiere (“Salieri and his acolytes would move heaven and earth to make him fall", commented Mozart's father, Leopold, referring to his son's first failure, only a temporary failure, as the success of this opera will later demonstrate). But at that time Salieri was busy in France with the performance of his opera Les Horaces , so it is unlikely that he really had the chance to decide the success or failure of an opera from that distance..

Much more likely (and always following Thayer), the one who instigated Mozart against Salieri could have been the poet Giovanni Battista Casti, rival of the court poet Lorenzo da Ponte, author of the libretto for Figaro. An indirect confirmation of the extent to which this dispute between Mozart and Salieri could have been artificially staged is the fact that, when Salieri was named Kapellmeister in 1788, instead of proposing for the occasion one of his operas he preferred to republish The Marriage of Figaro.

Many artists and writers dealt with this duality between Mozart and Salieri. In the musical and dramatic field, it is worth mentioning the composer Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov, who wrote an opera in 1898 (Mozart and Salieri), the playwright Peter Shaffer, who wrote the work of theater Amadeus, and above all the director Milos Forman with the 1984 film of the same name, based on Shaffer's work, winner of the Oscar and later reissued on DVD with the insertion of excerpts not included at its theatrical release.