An Operatic Legend Debunked
A Death in Vienna and the Birth of a Legend
Antonio Salieri painted by Joseph Willibrord Mähler
On a bleak December night in 1791, Vienna’s musical luminaries were stunned by the untimely death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, aged just 35. Whispers of foul play began almost immediately. Mozart’s body had grotesquely swollen in his final hours, leading some to suspect poison. In fact, Mozart himself — feverish and despairing — told his wife Constanze that he believed he was being given “Acqua Tofana,” a notorious Italian poison.These anxieties, shared by Constanze with friends and later biographers, planted the seed of a dark legend. But if Mozart was poisoned, who was responsible? In the absence of evidence, rumor filled the void. Soon a name emerged in hushed tones: Antonio Salieri, the Imperial Kapellmeister and Mozart’s senior colleague at the Viennese court.
In reality, Mozart’s death was not a murder at all. Modern medical analyses have dispelled the poisoning theory. As physician Peter J. Davies concluded in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “Mozart was not poisoned, and the ridiculous assertions about his poisoning should be laid to rest once and for all.” Contemporary accounts describe Mozart’s final illness in detail — a sudden fever with swelling, rash, and ultimately coma — consistent with natural causes like acute infection or kidney failure, not with covert arsenic poisoning. No credible evidence ever tied Salieri (or anyone else) to Mozart’s demise. Yet the image of a jealous rival slipping poison into the young genius’s cup proved irresistible to the Romantic imagination. How did this calumny take root and why has it persisted for over two centuries? The answer lies in a tangle of gossip, artistic myth-making, and the seductive drama of opera itself.
Seeds of Suspicion: Rumors in Salieri’s Lifetime
When Mozart died on December 5, 1791, Salieri was a towering figure in Vienna’s music scene – the court composer favored by Emperor Joseph II and a renowned master of Italian opera. He and Mozart had occasionally been professional rivals (both had competed for plum operatic commissions at court), and Mozart’s private letters sometimes complained about “cabals of Italians” in Vienna who were obstacles to his success. There was certainly creative competition between them, but rivalry in the cutthroat 18th-century operatic world was commonplace. Importantly, any personal animosity was likely far less dramatic than later fiction would suggest. In fact, the two composers even collaborated: in 1785 they jointly wrote a cantata celebrating their friend Nancy Storace’s recovery from illness – a gesture hardly befitting mortal enemies. And in 1786, they amicably shared a program at court, Mozart premiering his comedy Der Schauspieldirektor and Salieri his Prima la musica e poi le parole on the same evening. These episodes reveal collegial respect behind the scenes, belying the image of constant enmity.
Yet within weeks of Mozart’s death, whispers of poison began to swirl. An announcement in a Berlin paper on New Year’s Eve 1791 noted Mozart’s corpse had swelled and mused that “it is believed that he was poisoned.” Notably, these early reports did not name Salieri – they were generic murmurs born of shock and grief. Over the next decade, however, as Mozart’s legend grew, so did the shadow of suspicion over Salieri. By 1803 – a dozen years after Mozart’s passing – the young composer Carl Maria von Weber (a cousin of Mozart’s wife) visited Vienna and learned of the accusations against Salieri. Weber was sufficiently convinced by the gossip that he pointedly avoided any further contact with Salieri. The notion of Salieri as a poisoner had begun to creep through musical circles, despite the utter lack of proof. Historians note that this may have reflected a broader rivalry between advocates of German versus Italian music at the time, with Mozart’s German genius held up against Salieri’s Italianate style. Salieri, once celebrated, was becoming a convenient scapegoat in a growing nationalist narrative about Mozart’s “victimhood.”
Salieri himself was acutely aware of these malicious rumors. In 1822, the famed Italian composer Gioachino Rossini visited Vienna and was able to discuss the poisoning gossip jokingly with the aging Salieri. But by the autumn of 1823, the situation took a tragic turn. Salieri, at 73, suffered a severe physical and mental breakdown and was admitted to Vienna’s general hospital. In a delirium, he allegedly babbled fragments of guilt, accusing himself of having killed Mozart. However, it must be emphasized that Salieri was in a deranged state when this supposed “confession” occurred, and he soon regained lucidity and recoiled at what was being said in his name. Friends rushed to his side. Ignaz Moscheles, a composer who had studied with Salieri, recorded that Salieri told him “in good faith that there is no truth to the absurd rumor that I poisoned Mozart. It’s nothing but spite to tell the world that.” Two nurses and a doctor who attended Salieri later testified that they never heard him admit to any crime. Sadly, it was too late. The whiff of a confession by a “mad old man” spread like wildfire through Vienna. Even Ludwig van Beethoven, Salieri’s most famous pupil, heard of the allegation in his final years – though Beethoven reportedly did not credit it (after all, he had revered Salieri enough to dedicate violin sonatas to him, and he never believed his own teacher capable of murder).
Alarmed by the gossip, one of Salieri’s contemporaries, the Italian poet and biographer Giuseppe Carpani, published a vigorous defense of Salieri in 1824. Carpani’s letter in an Italian journal argued there was “no evidence of poisoning” and that Mozart likely died of natural illness, perhaps rheumatic fever. He reminded readers that Salieri’s caregivers swore the dying man never confessed to anything of the sort. Such rational voices, however, struggled to stem the tide. Salieri died in May 1825 with his reputation already darkened by the cloud of suspicion. In a cruel twist of fate, this kindly teacher and respected composer – once the toast of Vienna – was now remembered by many as Mozart’s supposed murderer. All the ingredients of an enduring myth were in place: genius cut down in his prime, an envious rival, and a confession wrung from a ravaged mind. It only required the spark of artistic imagination to ignite this story into legend.
Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri”: Art Fuels the Myth
Illustration from Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri , artist unknown.
In 1830, just five years after Salieri’s death, the myth leapt from rumor to literature. That year, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin penned a brief verse drama titled Mozart and Salieri, which for the first time cast the relationship in overtly murderous terms. Pushkin was likely inspired by the gossip that had traveled across Europe. In 1826, he scribbled in a notebook an anecdote he’d heard that the renowned Salieri had once stormed out of a performance of Don Giovanni “devoured by envy… An envier who was capable of having hissed Don Juan could have also poisoned its creator.” Though that particular anecdote was apocryphal – Salieri hadn’t actually been in Prague to hiss at Don Giovanni’s premiere. Pushkin had swallowed the rumors whole.
Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri is a tiny “little tragedy” – a two-character playlet, scarcely fifteen minutes long – but it packs a mighty dramatic punch. In Pushkin’s telling, Salieri, embodiment of envy, invites Mozart to dine and pours poison into his glass. “They say there’s no justice on earth… But there is justice Above – and there is no escape from it!” Salieri proclaims darkly as he administers the fatal dose, acting as a self-appointed divine nemesis to Mozart’s genius. The curtain falls on Mozart’s sudden death and Salieri’s tortured confession of his own emptiness. Pushkin’s aim was not historical truth but a poetic exploration of envy and artistic destiny. As scholar Caryl Emerson notes, each of Pushkin’s 1830 mini-dramas personified a human vice or theme. In Mozart and Salieri, the theme was Zavist, Russian for envy. Salieri is portrayed as a man who, though talented, feels god has unjustly favored Mozart with greater talent – a Cain to Mozart’s Abel, as many have noted. In reality, of course, Salieri never harmed Mozart; but Pushkin found in the myth a potent metaphor for the torment of mediocrity in the face of genius.
Pushkin’s dramatic take on the legend proved influential. It spread the Salieri-as-poisoner narrative to a wide European audience throughout the 19th century. In 1898, the great Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov amplified the myth further by adapting Pushkin’s play into a one-act opera titled Mozart and Salieri. Rimsky-Korsakov set Pushkin’s text almost verbatim as his libretto, preserving the chilling scene of Salieri poisoning Mozart. The opera’s premiere in Moscow in 1898 featured the legendary bass Fyodor Chaliapin as Salieri, lending the work considerable fame. Musicologist Laurel E. Fay notes that Mozart and Salieri, though based on a “rumor of the murder of Mozart by a contemporary rival,” is in fact a psychological character study – a meditation on creativity and insecurity rather than a literal whodunit. Rimsky-Korsakov, like Pushkin, used the tale to explore an artist’s inner turmoil. Salieri’s monologues in the opera are tortured and introspective, while Mozart appears as an innocent vessel of divine inspiration. The dramatic power of this operatic vignette kept the myth alive in opera circles. It was now literally set to music – an artistic irony, considering Salieri himself had been a celebrated opera composer. Audiences could easily assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire; the absence of historical evidence was overshadowed by the vividness of art. As one commentator wryly observed, Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov “transformed what certainly was a calumny into a work of art.”
By the turn of the 20th century, Antonio Salieri’s name had been thoroughly entwined with Mozart’s in the public mind – unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons. His own compositions had faded from the repertory, rarely heard on stage, while Mozart’s star only ascended higher. Generations of opera lovers came to know Salieri chiefly as the jealous villain in Mozart’s story. This literary and operatic legacy set the stage for the final, most famous reincarnation of the myth in the 20th century.
Amadeus: Requiem for a Reputation
F. Murray Abraham in the film version of Amadeus
The coup de grâce for Salieri’s reputation arrived in 1979, with the premiere of English playwright Peter Shaffer’s hit drama Amadeus, which was later adapted into an Academy Award–winning film in 1984, directed by Miloš Forman. Shaffer freely admitted he was writing a fantasy on the theme of talent versus mediocrity, not a documentary. In Amadeus, Salieri (portrayed unforgettably by actor F. Murray Abraham in the film) is a devout but mediocre composer who rails at God for speaking through the “obscene child” Mozart. He does not literally poison Mozart in the play; instead, Shaffer’s Salieri claims to have figuratively destroyed Mozart by driving him to despair. The murder, in other words, is psychological and metaphorical – a poetic license to dramatize how Mozart’s brilliance kills Salieri’s peace of mind. Nevertheless, many audiences came away believing Amadeus had shown them historical fact. The seductive power of film blurred into the authority of history. As music historian Jan Swafford quipped, “for some people, Amadeus may as well be a documentary” – so pervasive is its influence on the popular imagination.
It’s important to stress that Shaffer’s portrayal, while masterful theater, is not reality. Shaffer took Pushkin’s premise and ran with it as an exploration of divine injustice: why would God endow one man (Mozart) with such effortless genius and another (Salieri) with the awareness of his own mediocrity? The result is a compelling morality play, but one that Shaffer himself called a “fantasia on events in Mozart’s life.” According to musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon, the real Salieri was a far cry from Shaffer’s “patron saint of mediocrity.” In fact, by 1781 (when Mozart arrived in Vienna), Salieri was at the top of the musical hierarchy as court Kapellmeister and one of Europe’s most esteemed opera composers. While Shaffer’s Salieri famously declares “Mediocrities everywhere – I absolve you!,” the real Salieri was anything but a mediocrity in his art. Still, Amadeus was so brilliantly crafted that it cemented the myth for modern audiences. Peter Shaffer and Miloš Forman had done for the late 20th century what Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov did for the 19th: they turned the Salieri myth into compelling drama, indelibly imprinting it on the cultural memory.
Interestingly, Shaffer’s and Forman’s Amadeus does hint that the story is a metaphor. The film opens with Salieri’s feeble suicide attempt in 1823 (echoing those apocryphal rumors of his throat-slitting) and his commitment to an asylum. There, an old Salieri narrates his confession to a young priest, effectively framing the tale as the possibly unreliable narrative of a broken man. Nonetheless, the emotional core of the drama — Salieri as jealous destroyer of Mozart — registered so strongly that it rejuvenated the poisoning legend in the popular mind. Opera lovers and casual music fans alike were left with the image of Salieri as the ultimate jealous rival, a man who might go to any length to silence Mozart’s “voice of God.” The irony is that Shaffer intended Salieri as a tragic figure one almost sympathizes with, rather than a one-dimensional villain. But public reception often missed these nuances. After Amadeus, the Salieri myth became almost canonical.
Salieri’s True Legacy
It is time to draw back the curtain and spotlight the real Antonio Salieri — not the venomous caricature of myth, but the accomplished composer and mentor who left an indelible mark on opera history. Far from being an inferior footnote to Mozart, Salieri was a central figure of the Viennese Classical era, highly respected in his day. Born in 1750 in Legnago, Italy, Salieri rose to prominence in Vienna under the patronage of Emperor Joseph II. By his early 30s, he was appointed court composer and Kapellmeister, a position of enormous influence. He composed prolifically for the opera stage, writing over 35 operas in several languages, and was at the forefront of operatic innovation in the late 18th century.
Salieri’s operas were celebrated across Europe. His 1771 opera Armida, an opera seria based on Tasso’s epic, was translated into multiple languages and widely performed, helping establish Salieri’s reputation as “an important and innovative modern composer,” according to musicologist John Rice. In 1772 Salieri had a breakthrough comic hit with La Fiera di Venezia, a lively opera that included new techniques like mixing languages on stage and integrating ensembles with on-stage dances. This work was later noted as a precursor that even Mozart admired and emulated; indeed, one of its large ensemble scenes anticipated similar innovations in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Salieri’s flair for drama and melody made him a worthy successor to his mentor Christoph Willibald Gluck, the great reformer of opera. When Salieri ventured to Paris, he triumphed there as well. His opera Les Danaïdes (1784) actually premiered under Gluck’s name but was later revealed to be Salieri’s work, earning rapturous acclaim and a commission for another grand opera.
In 1787, Salieri unveiled Tarare in Paris, a bold operatic collaboration with the famed playwright Beaumarchais (author of The Marriage of Figaro). Tarare was conceived as the pinnacle of the new reformed opera, a synthesis of music and drama so complete that some scholars have called it an 18th-century anticipation of Wagner’s ideals. The opera was such a sensation that Emperor Joseph II immediately had it translated into Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s own librettist) so that Vienna could enjoy it. In this Italian version, re-titled Axur, re d’Ormus, Salieri’s opera became his greatest international success. Axur was performed to celebrate the wedding of the Austrian crown prince in 1788, and soon it spread throughout Europe, remaining in repertoire well into the 1790s. Remarkably, a production of Axur even reached as far as São Paulo, Brazil in 1824. This global reach is a testament to Salieri’s stature in his own era. While Mozart’s fame today eclipses Salieri’s, in the late 18th century Salieri was arguably just as renowned. Audiences hummed arias from Tarare/Axur, and critics praised his keen dramatic instincts. As Salieri biographer Volkmar Braunbehrens observes, Salieri had a gift for wringing the maximum theatrical effect from his materials. In one case, he took a mediocre comic libretto (La grotta di Trofonio) and elevated it with music of such quality that it became a huge hit. Far from a plodding mediocrity, Salieri was a nimble innovator. His music deftly combines Italian lyricism with the weightier structures of German symphonic writing, reflecting his unique position at the crossroads of European operatic traditions.
Beyond his compositions, Salieri’s influence as a teacher secured his legacy. He was one of the most sought-after instructors of his generation, renowned for his expertise in vocal composition and operatic style. Among his pupils were a who’s who of the next musical era. Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and even Franz Xaver Mozart (Mozart’s own son) all benefited from Salieri’s tutelage. That Mozart’s widow Constanze entrusted Salieri with teaching her son speaks volumes. It underscores that those who knew Salieri personally did not view him as a villain. On the contrary, they respected him as a musician and pedagogue of high caliber. Beethoven, for instance, maintained cordial relations with Salieri for decades, and early in his career Beethoven dedicated a set of violin sonatas (Op. 12) to Salieri out of gratitude. Such facts stand in stark contrast to the lurid myth of a life-and-death feud.
Sadly, after Salieri’s death in 1825, his music gradually slipped into obscurity as tastes changed. The 19th century Romantics idolized the emotional depth of Mozart and Beethoven, while Salieri’s elegant Classical-era works fell out of fashion. Thus by the time the mythologizers (Pushkin, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.) got hold of his story, few people knew his music well enough to counterbalance the portrayal of him as “Mozart’s destroyer.” The result was a one-dimensional legacy overshadowed by false infamy. As historian Alexander Wheelock Thayer famously lamented, Salieri “became a bogeyman in a totally fabricated legend: the jealous rival who poisoned Mozart.”
Today, however, scholars and performers are reclaiming Salieri’s rightful place. Musicologists like Braunbehrens and John A. Rice have combed the archives to separate fact from fiction, giving us a more accurate portrait of Salieri’s life and works. New recordings and performances of Salieri’s operas (from Europa riconosciuta staged at La Scala in 2004 to recent revivals of Tarare and Falstaff, including Chicago Opera Theater’s highly anticipated production) allow modern audiences to hear the music behind the man. And what do we find? We find a composer of grace, wit, and dramatic flair – a man who helped shape the course of opera between the age of Gluck and the age of Rossini. We discover a Salieri who is far more than Mozart’s footnote.
Will the Real Antonio Salieri Please Stand Up?!
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.”
It is heartening to see that narrative finally being corrected, and that Chicago Opera Theater can play a role in setting the record straight. Opera lovers today can appreciate Salieri and Mozart as they were: two brilliant composers, sometimes rivals, often colleagues, each contributing richly to the art form they loved. Mozart’s genius needs no exaggeration of his adversaries; his music stands as immortal proof of his greatness. And Salieri’s achievements need no apology. His operas speak eloquently for themselves to those willing to listen. The myth of murder may never be completely eradicated. It has a life of its own in pop culture, but informed audiences can enjoy Amadeus or Mozart and Salieri as imaginative fiction while knowing the truth underneath. In the final measure, justice (that elusive virtue Salieri longed for in Pushkin’s play) is best served by restoring Salieri’s reputation as a composer of substance.
Antonio Salieri deserves to be remembered not as the villain of Mozart’s story, but as a luminary in his own right: the court composer who guided Vienna’s opera scene for decades, the mentor of Beethoven and Schubert, and the artist who helped carry the flame of Italian opera into a new age. By debunking the murder myth with scholarly evidence and hearing Salieri’s music anew, we as opera lovers can finally allow Salieri’s true voice to sing again, unpoisoned and unshadowed by false legend.
In the end, the real tragedy was not Mozart’s imaginary poisoning, but the poisoning of Salieri’s legacy. It is high time we lay that myth to rest and let Antonio Salieri take a well-earned bow on the stage of music history – not as a murderer, but as a master. As writer Norman Gilland poignantly observed, in the long run it was not Mozart who was poisoned by envy, “but Antonio Salieri who had been poisoned.” Poisoned by rumor, that is, an injustice that we, armed with historical truth and musical appreciation, can finally help to heal.