Salieri - Symphonies Overtures & Variations

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Salieri - Symphonies Overtures & Variations

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Salieri - Symphonies Overtures & Variations

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Salieri acquired great prestige as a composer and conductor, particularly of opera, but also of chamber and sacred music. The most successful of his more than 40 operas included Armida (1771), La scuola de' gelosi (1778), Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), Les Danaïdes (1784), which was first presented as a work of Gluck's, Tarare (1787), Axur, Re d'Ormus (1788), Palmira, Regina di Persia (1795), and Falstaff o sia Le tre burle (1799). He wrote comparatively little instrumental music, however his limited output includes two piano concertos and a concerto for organ written in 1773, a concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra (1774), and a set of 26 variations on La Follia di Spagna (1815).
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Shortly after he died that rumors first spread that he had confessed to Mozart's murder on his deathbed. Salieri's two nurses, Gottlieb Parsko and Georg Rosenberg, as well as his family doctor Joseph Röhrig, attested that he never said any such thing. At least one of these three people was with him throughout his hospitalization.

Within a few years after Salieri's death in 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin wrote his "little tragedy" Mozart and Salieri (1831) as a dramatic study of the sin of envy, thus beginning an artistic tradition of poetic license based on Mozart's allegation. Although Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov adapted Pushkin's play as an opera of the same name in 1898 (as an homage to his predecessor Alexander Dargomyzhsky), the most significant perpetuation of the story is credited to Peter Shaffer's heavily fictionalized play Amadeus (1979) and the Oscar-winning 1984 film directed by Miloš Forman based upon it; both Shaffer and Forman expressly maintained the fictional nature of their respective works. Salieri is presented as both in awe and spite for Mozart and his talents, going so far as to renounce God for blessing Mozart, whilst also weeping in disbelief at the sound of the composer's music.

Due largely to Shaffer's play and its movie adaptation, the word "Salieri" has entered colloquialisation to mean a merely competent artist standing in the shadow of a genius, or worse, an incompetent musician.