For too long, Antonio Salieri’s name has been shackled to a myth born of gossip and gilded by genius storytellers. The tale of Salieri murdering Mozart makes for gripping drama, but we must remind ourselves that this story is a legend, not history. Mozart died of natural causes, not by Salieri’s hand. The rumor that Salieri confessed to poisoning Mozart was nothing more than the tragic delusion of a sick old man – a rumor his contemporaries rightly dismissed as absurd spite. Yet the fictional Salieri lives on in plays, operas, and films, casting a long shadow over the real man’s legacy. According to musicologist Arthur Schluger, this legend says less about Salieri or Mozart and more about the Romantic era’s need for dramatic narratives: “In the end, we created a Mozart who was martyred and a Salieri who was demonized, because the story was simply too good – and too instructive – not to believe.”

Shakespeare himself often reflected on the power of music and imagination. In Twelfth Night, the Duke’s famous line—“If music be the food of love, play on”—acknowledges music as nourishment for our most powerful emotions. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo warns that “The man that hath no music in himself… is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils,” affirming music’s role as a measure of humanity itself. And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare offers a vision of the creative process itself: “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” These words remind us why his plays have so often inspired composers and librettists: they are already alive with rhythm, song, and theatrical imagination, inviting reinvention on the operatic stage.