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Antonio Salieri, maligned immigrant [1]
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Date: 2025-01-18
Maligning immigrants and falsely accusing them of crimes is nothing new, it has been going on for centuries. For example, the Italian-born Viennese composer Antonio Salieri. Although the false accusation that he murdered Leopold Mozart’s son never gained traction in any court of law, the damage to his posthumous reputation has been tremendous.
Supposedly jealous of the obvious innate talent of an immature but inherently superior white man, the supposedly mediocre Italian wrote operas that were very popular because opera fans back then did not have such sophisticated taste as we do in the present day… or as Salieri himself did back then?
Last year, there was a strange production of Antonio Salieri’s Kublai Khan, a premiere, sort of. After the rousing overture, the composer, who’s been dead for almost two centuries now, shows up in the present day, played by Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz, apparently both to supervise the production but also be a part of it onstage? This is almost three hours, but hey, I’ve listened to Act I of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in one sitting (I know that’s not three hours, but it does feel that long).
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Let me never again criticize a production of Richard Wagner’s Ring set in space, or in a trailer park, or on the Klingon homeworld, or whatever other strange place Wagner himself would have never considered.
Because at least in those productions, if you know the music, you can follow along with the plot. Though I have been very confused with the Castellucci production…
Sometimes Salieri’s music reminds me of Rossini, particularly in opere such as Falstaff. More usually, though, he reminds me of Beethoven. As it turns out, and this is something they won’t tell you in any music appreciation class, Beethoven sought Salieri out as a teacher.
In the strange new production of Kublai Khan, it threw me that Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz as Salieri mostly speaks German and only occasionally Italian. But this makes sense. Salieri was an immigrant to Vienna, he made his home there for almost six decades. Salieri became Austrian.
And he was in such high demand as an opera composer that he wound up writing more than forty opere in three different languages: Italian mostly, but also a few in French and a couple in German.
When not yet 16-years-old, Salieri went to Vienna with his mentor, Florian Gaßmann, and lived with him until Gaßmann’s death. Counts as a childhood arrival, I think. The poor fellow was an orphan. Don’t think they mentioned that in Amadeus, would’ve made him too sympathetic a character. (Read Marija Vucic’s article in The Collector for other tidbits about Salieri that didn’t make it into Amadeus, like the bit about his wife and their eight children).
And so, as he grew up, Salieri paid Gaßmann’s kindness forward, helping younger composers, including Leopold Mozart’s son Wolfgang Amadeus. But it was not enough for Leopold Mozart, who, expecting Salieri to cede every opportunity to his son, complained about the supposed cabal determined to hold his son’s career back. In the most famous of the elder Mozart’s letters, he complains about “Salieri and his tribe” (I presume this is an accurate translation). “Tribe,” as in the Italians.
Emperor Joseph II loved Italian opera, so he had Italian poets come to write libretti for his opera company. It was only natural to hire Salieri to compose opere. Wolfgang Amadeus also wrote opere for Joseph II. But when Wolfgang’s efforts did not earn the same pay and acclaim, it was automatically because of the Italian cabal.
For all his success and integration into Viennese society, Leopold Mozart never considered Salieri a true Austrian. As Salieri’s music faded to obscurity, it was easy to attribute that to Salieri’s racial and technical inferiority, which for Nazis like Hans Pfitzner were equivalent. But hey, let’s not question why Leopold Mozart’s music also fell into obscurity.
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