Antonio Salieri: The composer accused of killing Mozart
Conspiracy theories and tactless true crime mysteries might seem like distinctly 2020s forms of entertainment, but this stuff has been fascinating people and ruining reputations for hundreds of years, with the opera scene of the 18th century being no exception.
After the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791, at the age of 35, rumours began to spread, albeit a lot slower than they do on Reddit, that the great wunderkind composer might have been killed, poisoned, in fact. It didn’t matter that there was no direct evidence of such a crime, nor any investigations by the authorities of the time; there wasn’t even any reason to suspect foul play, as people in the 1700s were dropping dead at all ages, all the time, due to the complete lack of understanding of infections and viruses.
Nonetheless, losing a great artist like Mozart at the peak of his powers left some admirers searching for answers, or a scapegoat, and the Italian composer Antonio Salieri seemed to fit the profile of a potentially bitter and vengeful assassin. Many of us are still quite familiar with this conspiracy in the 21st century, not because any case was ever brought against Salieri, but because the various rumours about him inspired the imaginations of future artists, each of whom saw fertile ground for an interesting piece of storytelling.
After 40 years from Mozart’s death, the Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin got the ball rolling with his 1832 play Mozart and Salieri, which depicts the two composers’ conflicting responses to watching a blind man play the violin (the joyous Mozart thinks it’s great; the grizzled Salieri finds it appalling). This helped lock in the idea of Salieri as the crusty old man of the musical establishment, and Mozart as the free-thinking rebel genius.
Nearly 150 years later, the British playwright Peter Shaffer returned to the story and fleshed it out considerably, leaning into one specific rumour in which Salieri, on his deathbed, supposedly had confessed to poisoning Mozart. This confession became the opening scene of Shaffer’s Tony-winning 1979 play Amadeus, which in turn was adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name five years later.
The story in Amadeus was so powerful, focusing particularly on Salieri’s bitterness and jealousy toward the brilliant and cavalier Mozart, that it permanently locked in our modern notions of who Salieri was, clouding over the real man’s considerable accomplishments as one of the titans of music in the court of the Habsburgs. If the real Salieri truly felt like Vienna wasn’t big enough for Mozart and himself, it doesn’t explain why he later took other young savants under his wing, including Beethoven, Schubert, and even Mozart’s own son.
The character of Salieri in Amadeus, most recently played by Paul Bettany in a TV adaptation, is so memorable and almost delightfully spiteful that it has become practically synonymous with the notion of artistic jealousy, or envy of genius, in almost any context, be it sports, politics, and more. Anyone who works hard at something for many years, only to find themselves faced with an effortlessly superior counterpart, is inevitably going to be compared to the long-dead Italian composer.
It’s possible that this whole strange legacy for Antonio Salieri can be traced back to a single letter he wrote to a friend in 1822, when he was 72 years old and feeling, like a lot of older artists do, that he’d been forgotten by the mainstream. “I feel that the end of my days is drawing near,” Salieri wrote, “My senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honoured by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace.”
That sounds like someone trying to come to peace with their mortality, but I suppose, for the sake of a good true crime conspiracy, it also sounds like a guy who probably murdered Mozart.
