Antonio Salieri (1750 – 1825): Requiem in C Minor
Mention the name Antonio Salieri and most people will immediately think of the sneering, scheming villain of the 1980s Hollywood film, Amadeus, as he plots the downfall and demise of his great musical adversary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
But the notion of Salieri’s homicidal jealousy towards a super talented (but super annoying) rival has been around for longer than we think. In his miniature tragedy, Mozart and Salieri (1831), the Russian poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin has Salieri drop poison into Mozart’s drink after bemoaning that “immortal genius, comes not in reward for fervent love, for total self-rejection, for work and for exertion and for prayers, but casts its light upon a madman’s head, an idle loafer’s brow… ” There are similar, tortured lines uttered by F Murray Abraham’s Salieri in the film adaption made 150 years later, as he blames God for playing such an appalling trick on him.
Deliciously irresistible though the story is, its finer details have never quite withstood closer scrutiny. No evidence has survived, for example, to suggest that Salieri was ever particularly troubled by Mozart’s talent. In 1780s Vienna, the older and better-established Salieri was top dog on the opera scene: the envy, if anything, came from Mozart’s side, who complained bitterly in his letters that Salieri was getting all the best gigs as well as best librettists. Even more contentious is the idea that Salieri was a plodding second-rater and only too aware of it. He certainly did not see himself that way. He may have been up against a musical genius, but his own work is still of a notably high quality when set against any other standards.
There is a fair amount of evidence that the two composers shared a broad mutual respect and even promoted each other’s work, especially so towards the end of Mozart’s life. They even collaborated on the odd occasion. A little recent scholarship has thankfully come to the aid of Salieri’s overall reputation, the ultimate irony of Amadeus being that it has helped spur a revival of interest in his own life and music.
So we know that Salieri was born in Legnago in northern Italy, not that far from Venice. And that he received his first musical tuition from a violin-playing older brother who was good enough to give solo concerts in the surrounding area. When both of Salieri’s parents died while he was still in his early teens (the first of several personal tragedies he was to suffer in his life), he was fortunately taken in by the Mocenigos, a well-connected Venetian clan who may already have been family friends.
Salieri continued his musical studies in Venice until at the age of sixteen he attracted the attention of one Florian Leopold Gassman, a Bohemian opera composer, who took him on as his apprentice in Vienna. Salieri’s education was henceforth both musical and literary (he also learned German and Latin), while at the same time he was able to build up a handy network of contacts. Gassman introduced him to Emperor Franz Joseph II (who would become a trusted friend for the next twenty years), as well as to opera librettist, Pietro Metastasio and opera composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck. The latter in particular would have an important stylistic influence on Salieri’s work.
When Salieri did begin to write his own operas, he scored an almost immediate hit with his three-act Armida, written at the age of just 20. It is an alluring tale of love, magic and conflicted loyalty set during the First Crusade, in which a Saracen sorceress named Armida is ordered to kill the Christian warrior, Rinaldo, but instead falls in love with him. Thus began a successful 34-year career on the Viennese stage for Salieri, writing operas in both Italian and German, while sometimes shuttling off to the Parisian opera houses to offer them French-language works. He would manage a new opera just about every year, and his professionalism and general reliability would see him appointed director of Italian opera at the Habsburg court from 1774 to 1792 and then Austrian imperial Kapellmeister from 1788 until 1824.
By the early 1800s, however, his works were no longer being received as well as they had, and Salieri himself felt that his style of writing was falling out of fashion: “From that period”, he later said, “I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner completely contrary to that of my own times. Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity.” In 1804, aged 54, he did two things: he retired from the operatic stage. At the same time, presumably with his own impending mortality in mind, he wrote this little Requiem, intending it to be premiered at his funeral*.
*Salieri would give the work a distinctly self-deprecating title: Piccolo requiem composto da me, e per me, Antonio Salieri, piccolissima creatura, Viena, Agosto 1804 (“A little requiem composed by me and for me, Antonio Salieri, the smallest of creatures …”).
Setting the powerful and dramatic texts of a requiem mass to music can often bring out the most interesting sides to a composer. In Salieri’s case, he appears to alternate a classical world of relative calm and balance with something altogether more turbulent. With a sure operatic touch, he keeps varying the mood, usually subdividing each movement into several contrasting sections. Perhaps most notable is his setting of the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) sequence, a Medieval poem depicting the Last Judgement, with a trumpet summoning souls before God to be either saved or cast into eternal flames.
Salieri particularly enjoys himself with the sequence, showing much of the same operatic sensitivity to word painting, such as the dramatic tutti (with suitable tremolos in the string section) which accompanies the text “quantus tremor est futurus” (“how great will be the quaking”). And he saves some highly original harmonic modulations for the words “Ingemisco Tamquan Reus” (“I sigh, like the guilty one”) and also “Confutatis Maledictus” (“when the wicked are confounded”).
By contrast, the mood of both the Offertorium and Sanctus is much more upbeat, with distinct echoes of the grand choruses of George Frideric Handel from half a century earlier. The Agnus Dei and Libera Mei then conclude the work in great solemnity, with brass instruments alone accompanying the latter movement and creating a suitably austere atmosphere. There is a short, ceremonial sounding dialogue between four soloists and the rest of the choir as they sing the lines of the “Requiem Aeternam” once more, before the minor key tonality finally resolves into a quiet C Major chord.
The music would be made to wait some time for its first performance, as Salieri comfortably lived on for another twenty years. He continued to write sacred and non-operatic music, although without anything like the same public exposure as before. He took part in several charitable schemes and became a noted teacher in vocal composition, usually giving his lessons for free. He numbered Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt among his pupils, as well as one of Mozart’s sons, Franz Xavier. He also suffered more personal heartache, with the premature deaths of both his only son and then his wife in 1805 and 1807 respectively.
When Salieri himself died in 1825, both Beethoven and Schubert attended his funeral and heard the Requiem premiered (hardly the worst audience for such an occasion). The work has since been half-forgotten while deserving better. Although firmly based on classical principles, its more dramatic sections anticipate the great symphonic, romantically expressive requiems of the mid nineteenth century, such as those by Berlioz and Verdi.
Suggestions for Further Listening
Anyone curious to know more about Salieri’s career should check out his operas. There are full recordings of both Armida and Axur re D’Ormus (1788 – perhaps his most famous work) available on Youtube, but here is a taster of each:
Antonio Salieri – Axur, re d’Ormus – Aria di Aspasia – Come fuggir… Son queste le speranze
Also worthy of a listen is a late orchestral work from 1816, Salieri’s charming and inventive 26 Variations on “La Folia di Spagna”.