Overture Magazine 2019-20 BSO_Overture_Jan Feb | Page 15

CONCERT SEASON 2019 - 2020
Who was Antonio Salieri?
Throughout the drama, we see Mozart
and hear his music exclusively from the
viewpoint of the jealous Salieri. The entire
story flows from Salieri’s confession to a
young priest, made in 1823 more than
thirty years after Mozart’s death, that he is
tormented by the belief he drove Mozart
to his death. This was a giant expansion
of an idea suggested by the legendary
Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in his
1830 play Mozart and Salieri, in which
the envious Italian murders Mozart. Later
in the century, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
made this play into an opera.
But was Antonio Salieri really guilty
of such a thing? Historians all say no
and point to the apparent friendship
between the two men and the fact that
Mozart actually asked the older man to
teach music to his son. Born in Legnano,
Italy, Salieri came to the Viennese
court as a teenage musician and soon
became the protégé and close friend of
the great composer Christoph Willibald
Gluck. Kapellmeister to the Viennese
court for 36 years, Salieri was in fact a
prolific and successful composer whose
operas triumphed in Vienna and Paris,
though they have been forgotten today.
Admired for his encouragement of young
musicians, he was a superb teacher who
counted Beethoven, Schubert, Hummel
and Liszt among his pupils. There is no
record that he ever had a nervous collapse
or spent time in a mental asylum.
Schaffer admits that his story is
fictional: “a fantasia on the theme
of Mozart and Salieri .…Obviously,
Amadeus on stage was never intended
to be a documentary biography of the
composer, and the film was even less of
one.” Nevertheless, profound truths lie
hidden within Schaffer’s fiction.
The Making of the Film
In the audience of one of the first
performances of the play was the Czech-
born film director Miloš Forman, who
had defected to the West in 1968. He
said he immediately wanted to make
the drama into a film. Having directed
the film version of Hair in 1981, he was
thoroughly experienced in handling
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JA N – F E B 2020 / OV E R T U R E
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