The real man was a more or less benevolent character who energetically involved himself in the musical life of Vienna and taught dozens of composers, including Beethoven and Schubert. The find made clear what scholars have long known: that the two were more colleagues than rivals, and that their relationship was complicated mainly by Mozart’s tendency to see plots arrayed against him.Īs brilliant as Abraham’s performance in “Amadeus” is, the Salieri of stage and screen is a fictional being. In 2015, Herrmann discovered the score of a cantata, “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia,” with one section composed by Salieri and another by Mozart. A German-language biography of Salieri, by the composer and musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann, was published earlier this year. I was in Vienna to attend Rousset’s performance of Salieri’s French opera “Tarare” at the Theater an der Wien. Of his forty-odd operas, more than a dozen have been revived, and artists such as Riccardo Muti, Cecilia Bartoli, and Christophe Rousset have pleaded his case. These were evidence that the man and his music are enjoying a modest comeback. Two centuries of calumny have created sympathy for the musical devil: I found Salieri’s grave festooned with bouquets. Five years after that, Miloš Forman made a flamboyant film out of Shaffer’s material, with F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri as a suave, pursed-lipped malefactor. In 1979, the British playwright Peter Shaffer wrote “Amadeus,” a sophisticated variation on Pushkin’s concept, which became a mainstay of the modern stage. Later in the nineteenth century, Rimsky-Korsakov turned Pushkin’s play into a witty short opera. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play “Mozart and Salieri,” casting the former as a doltish genius and the latter as a jealous schemer. Shortly before he died, in 1825, a story that he had poisoned Mozart went around Vienna. Salieri is one of history’s all-time losers-a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip. I had brought a rose, thinking that the grave might be a neglected and cheerless place. Amid these miscellaneous worthies, resting beneath a noble but unpretentious obelisk, is the composer Antonio Salieri, Kapellmeister to the emperor of Austria. Along the perimeter wall, I passed an array of lesser-known but not uninteresting figures: Simon Sechter, who gave a counterpoint lesson to Schubert Theodor Puschmann, an alienist best remembered for having accused Wagner of being an erotomaniac Carl Czerny, the composer of piano exercises that have tortured generations of students and Eusebius Mandyczewski, a magnificently named colleague of Brahms. When I entered the cemetery, I turned left, disregarding Beethoven and company. Beethoven, whose two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday arrives next year, will supply a fifth of Carnegie Hall’s 2019-20 season. According to statistics compiled by the Web site Bachtrack, works by those four gentlemen appear in roughly a third of concerts presented around the world in a typical year. In a musicians’ grove at the heart of the complex, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms rest in close proximity, with a monument to Mozart standing nearby. On a chilly, wet day in late November, I visited the Central Cemetery, in Vienna, where several of the most familiar figures in musical history lie buried.
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