Antonio Salieri, portrait by Joseph Willibrord Mähler. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
On 14 October 1791, seven weeks before he died, Mozart writes his wife a letter in excellent spirits: he has taken Salieri and his companion by carriage to hear The Magic Flute, and the Italian didn’t stop shouting bravo for a moment, from the overture to the last chorus, saying it was an opera worthy of being performed before the greatest monarchs. It is the last direct testimony on the relationship between the two. How we got from that carriage to the poison is one of the most instructive stories about the manufacture of legends.
The slander was born thirty years later, when Salieri, old and hospitalised, his mind by now clouded, reportedly accused himself of the crime, only to retract in his lucid moments; his two nurses signed a declaration: never heard a word of the kind. But Vienna gossiped, musical nationalisms were blowing, and in 1830 Pushkin turned the rumour into a small theatrical masterpiece, Mozart and Salieri, from which Rimsky-Korsakov drew an opera. The twentieth century did the rest: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and Forman’s film, masterpieces too, and avowedly fiction too, handed the planet a mediocre, murderous Salieri. The fiction was so well written that it became collective memory.
The documents tell of a different man, and frankly a more interesting one. The professional rivalry with Mozart existed, with slights and factions, as at every court; but in 1785 the two even wrote a cantata together for the recovery of a singer, Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, whose score, lost, resurfaced in Prague in 2016. As director of the court concerts, Salieri programmed and conducted Mozart’s music for years, even after his death. And above all: he was the greatest teacher of his age. Through his school, mostly free for poor pupils, passed Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Czerny, Meyerbeer. And a little boy named Franz Xaver Mozart, Wolfgang’s younger son: Constanze, the widow, chose for him the alleged poisoner of his father. It is hard to imagine a more definitive rebuttal.
The legend will not die all the same, because it answers a need stronger than facts: the need to believe that genius is persecuted by the envy of mediocrities, like the need to believe that Mozart died poor and was thrown into a mass grave. Melos, by trade, sides with the boring party: the party of documents. Where one finds, almost always, that the truth is less theatrical than the legend and more moving: an old master teaching, for free, the son of his dead rival.