Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera. As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary, and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers.
Antonio Salieri was born in Legnago, in the Republic of Venice. He was first taught at home by his older brother Francesco Salieri (a former student of Giuseppe Tartini), and he received further lessons from the organist of the Legnago Cathedral, Giuseppe Simoni, a pupil of Padre Giovanni Battista Martini. In 1765 or 1766, he became the ward of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo. Later Salieri gained the attention of the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, impressed with his protege’s talents, took the young orphan to Vienna in 1766, where he personally directed and paid for the remainder of Salieri’s musical education.
Salieri’s first full opera Le donne letterate, based on Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies) was composed in 1770. The modest success of this work launched Salieri’s 34-year operatic career as a composer of over 35 original dramas. Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 until 1792, Salieri dominated Italian-language opera in Vienna. Among the most successful of his operas staged during his lifetime were Armida (1771), La fiera di Venezia (1772), La scuola de’ gelosi (1778), Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), Les Danaïdes (1784), Axur, re d’Ormus (1788), Palmira, regina di Persia (1795), Falstaff (1799), and Cesare in Farmacusa (1800). During his career, he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Paris, Rome, and Venice, and his dramatic works were widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime. As the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister from 1788 to 1824, he was responsible for music at the court chapel and attached school. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart were among the most famous of his pupils.
Salieri’s music slowly disappeared from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868 and was rarely heard after that period until the revival of his fame in the late 20th century. This revival was due to the fictionalized depiction of Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979) and its 1984 film version. The death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791 at the age of 35 was followed by rumours that he and Salieri had been bitter rivals, and that Salieri had poisoned the younger composer, yet this has been proven false, and they were far more evidence of a cooperative relationship between the two composers than one of real enmity.