Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Salieri

My Two Cents About Antonio Salieri

Today’s post began as a response to a question by Jon Haag at the bottom of yesterday’s remarks about the Bard Music Festival, in which I shared news of some newly-rediscovered music by Antonio Salieri: “Do these new found works bring a better appreciation of Antonio’s works or is that still up for debate?”

But of course, I got carried away – enough so that I thought, “Hey, I could use this for today’s post.” With that in mind, here are my two cents about Salieri.

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I’m not sure how much is up for debate, really, once people’s awareness is expanded beyond “Amadeus” – a great play and a great film, but reminiscent of my remark on your Freddie Mercury biopic comment the other day, the figure of Salieri was leveraged for dramatic purposes. The historic Salieri was never the envious, scheming hack of Peter Shaffer’s imagination. However, thanks to “Amadeus,” that’s how he is widely perceived.

Ironically, if not for the widespread success of the movie, most people would probably never even have heard of him. So poor Antonio has Shaffer to thank, at least, for making him a household name.

Incidentally, Shaffer was not the first to tell this story. Rumors of Salieri having contributed to Mozart’s early demise have followed him down the centuries. It was the subject of a play by Pushkin and an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. But it’s all bunk.

Happily, the resulting prurient interest also spurred a revival of performances and recordings of his music. And you know what? The music is not half-bad. Don’t pay attention to the blithe dismissals of classical music know-it-alls (as the genre surely does attract its share of bitchy wisenheimers).

Was Salieri as “good” as Mozart? Of course not. But who was? His music may lack the facility, invention, and humanity of Mozart at his finest. But Salieri was certainly capable, he could delight or be dramatic, and he could write a good tune. I don’t claim to be a Salieri expert, but I have heard more of his music than most.

As for the rediscovery of these 149 pieces, I very much doubt they will change his standing, as it were, but yes, more information always brings a better appreciation, or at least a more complete understanding. It’s seldom that a musical manuscript is discovered that completely revolutionizes anyone’s perception of a composer. It’s more like filling in a detail on a portrait or finding a missing puzzle piece.

These particular works are interesting in that they reveal something of his friendship with confidant and kindred spirit Prince Joseph von Dietrichstein. The pieces were copied in the composer’s own hand, cherrypicked for inclusion in four red leatherbound volumes, presumably to commemorate works of his that were performed at the prince’s gatherings.

Lost works by major composers actually turn up with surprising frequency. A “new” song by Ralph Vaughan Williams was discovered only a few weeks ago. A couple of years ago, there was a waltz attributed to Chopin. The biggest one in recent memory was the rediscovery of a work by Stravinsky, written in memory of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. It’s no masterwork, but it’s interesting, in light of the two composers’ relationship. But it’s still an early work and doesn’t particularly sound like the influential composer Stravinsky was soon to become.

Once in a while, somebody thinks they landed a big fish. In the early 20th century, a new “Beethoven” symphony was found. Of course, it turned out to be by somebody else. In the earlier ‘80s, there was a hullabaloo about a rediscovered Mozart symphony – also probably not by him, but I like it.

Salieri composed 37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces. His own music aside, he was an influential figure, as Imperial Kapellmeister at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Among his pupils were Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver.

Far from blackballing his colleague, Salieri revived “The Marriage of Figaro.” He was also responsible for arranging first performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 (K. 482), the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40. He was full of praise for “The Magic Flute.”

The two composers even collaborated on a cantata, “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), rediscovered in 2016. The cantata was written in 1785, to celebrate the recently-convalesced soprano Nancy Storace, who was soon to create the role of Susanna in Mozart’s “Figaro.”

This will be one of the works performed at this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Mozart and His World” – as mentioned in yesterday’s post, archived at the link:

https://rossamico.com/2026/06/03/mozart-and-his-world-including-salieri-at-the-bard-music-festival/

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Salieri, Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra

Mozart and Salieri collaborative effort, the cantata “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia”

Rediscovered “Odense” Symphony, attributed to Mozart

Stravinsky’s “Funeral Song”

Waltz attributed to Chopin

News of Salieri rediscoveries, now in English

Long-lost Salieri manuscripts rediscovered, revealing previously unknown works

June 4, 2026
Mozart and His World (Including Salieri) at the Bard Music Festival

With the news that 149 lost works of Antonio Salieri have come to light, now seems like a good time to remind you about this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Mozart and His World” (to be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16).

Is there Salieri on the program? Why, yes, yes there is. It falls under the category of “His World.” You see, even when the focus of the festival is on a well-known composer – and what composer is better-known than Mozart? – the planning committee goes into overdrive, racking their brains and spackling in around the edges with composers and works your average person-on-the-street may not have ever heard of, and certainly have never heard.

My preference, of course, is for the years Bard tackles figures such as Bohuslav Martinu or Carlos Chávez or Ralph Vaughan Williams or Erich Wolfgang Korngold; but under the Mozart umbrella, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Josef Mysliveček, Paul Wranitzky, Emanuel Schickaneder, Giovanni Paisiello, Muzio Clementi, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Franz Xaver Mozart (Mozart’s composer son), and composer sons of the great Johann Sebastian Bach will have their moments to shine. Some of the works will be quite substantial, such as Michael Haydn’s Requiem in C minor.

And these are only the composers you might have heard of, through reading about Mozart in histories or program notes. How often, if ever, have you actually heard their music?

I don’t care about your level of expertise, or how jaded you may be, between the unusual repertoire, the imaginative juxtaposition of pieces, the pre-concert talks, and the Saturday morning panels with scholars and historians, you will ALWAYS learn something. Even if I personally may bristle at the idea of a Mozart festival – nothing wrong with it, it just doesn’t excite me – once you get me in the hall, I know it’s going to be fabulous.

The Bard Music Festival is part of the college’s larger celebration of the arts, Bard SummerScape (June 25-August 16), which encompasses opera, theater, dance, and cabaret at the campus’ Spiegeltent. If Mozart really doesn’t float your boat, there will be a fully-staged production of Richard Strauss’ opera “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen,” July 24-August 2). When’s the last time you heard that?

The Mozart festival will conclude with a semi-staged performance of “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”

Hang in there: 2027 will bring “Gershwin and His World.” That’s a subject that can shoot out tendrils in so many different, fascinating directions.

For tickets and information about Bard SummerScape, the Bard Music Festival, and “Mozart and His World,” visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/.

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A blurb about the rediscovered Salieri works (which include canons, duets, and trios, in the composer’s hand), with a link to the original German source:

https://slippedisc.com/2026/06/found-149-autograph-works-by-salieri/

A selection from Salieri’s “Prima la musica e poi le parole” (“First the music and then the words”), first performed on the same occasion that introduced Mozart’s “Schauspieldirektor” (“The Impresario”), and his collaboration with Mozart, the cantata “Per la ricuperate salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), rediscovered in 2015, will be included on a Bard Music Festival concert on August 9.

@fishercenterbard

June 3, 2026
Mozart at Bard; Botstein in the Bardo

I can’t believe it’s been two months already since the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts announced that the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival will be “Mozart and His World.” The festival, now in its 36th year, will we be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16. The fact that I didn’t share the news immediately is attributable to several factors:

Firstly, I’m sorry, Mozart may have been one the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived – and he wrote some music I would never want to be without (e.g. “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera I like to say basically saved my life, or least got me through a very rough time) – but the idea of two weekends of his music doesn’t exactly thrill me.

In the past, I wouldn’t have considered it an issue, since the “and His World” qualifier ensured there would be plenty of fascinating discoveries by the subject’s contemporaries, those who influenced him, and those he in turn influenced.

Also, historically, Bard has been exceptional in digging deep into composers’ basements and turning up neglected scores from cobwebbed corners of their attics. This year, alas, seems to be a little disappointing in these regards.

For one thing, I was hoping the programs would mix it up a bit more and cast some light into the future. After all, there are so many pieces influenced by or written in tribute to Mozart. One program will include Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana” – hardly a rarity, but at least it will be presented in a lesser-heard piano version – though I would expect the concerts to also weave in works such as Jean Françaix’s “Hommage à l’ami Papageno” for wind ensemble or, say, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, with its clearly Mozartian slow movement. If not those works specifically, perhaps a few like them.

Of course at Bard, you never know everything you’re going to get until the actual, physical program goes to print. This early in the process, what’s given on the website is frequently but a sketch. But I imagine the major works are in place.

Anyway, for all my grousing, I will be there for at least some of it, and once I am in the concert halls and into the music, I know I will have a good time, regardless, even if I can’t imagine buying a ticket based on being able to hear the “Prague Symphony” again.

Unquestionably, there will be rarities: a Michael Haydn mass, selections from a Salieri opera, a Clementi piano sonata that contains the germ for Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute.” But what about the Mozart-Salieri collaboration “Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia,” rediscovered as recently as 2016? How about Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera “Mozart and Salieri?” Or Reynaldo Hahn’s “Mozart?”

As always with these things, people will have their own ideas, and I know I should be thankful for anything this group organizes – and I am! But there’s no way I can pretend to be anywhere near as pumped for a Mozart festival as I was for those devoted to past subjects, such as Prokofiev, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Berlioz, Vaughan Williams, Bohuslav Martinů, Carlos Chávez, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Okay, I’ve been putting it off, but now at last I come to the elephant in the room. I so badly do not want to even address it, but there’s the unfortunate quagmire through which co-artistic director Leon Botstein – also president of Bard College since 1975 – is currently slogging. If you don’t already know it, Botstein is in the Epstein files. Not with anything like the same frequency as the President of the United States, mind you, or, from what we know so far, with anywhere near the same degree of skeeviness. Actually, it doesn’t appear there’s any skeeviness at all. But the timing couldn’t be worse. The excrement hit the fan just before this year’s festival would have to be announced.

The New York Times has covered Botstein’s interactions with Epstein extensively, but a lot of “journalists,” I’ve noticed, in particular those writing for the local papers of the Hudson Valley, seem to have their knives out, through suggestive phraseology and loaded words. The last thing Bard needs, in this sensitive situation, is for anyone to be striking sparks.

I hasten to add, although Botstein is kind of a hero to me, I am in no way discounting the real and lasting trauma experienced by any of Epstein’s victims or that of anyone else who has suffered sexual abuse in their personal lives or at the hands of anyone on the faculty of the college itself (which has been alleged; after all, it is a college, and there are often abuses of authority at such institutions). There have been no allegations of Botstein himself participating in any illegal behavior.

However, one of Epstein’s victims made an interesting point in an interview when she stated that the fact that Epstein was able to attract someone as estimable as Botstein to his sphere – and Botstein is FAR from the only one – it lent to an illusion of legitimacy, so that she and others like her struggled with the disconnect between what they were seeing, this kind of acceptance, and what they were actually experiencing.

But Botstein himself appears to be clean, and the man himself has done so much for not only music, but for education, for social causes, and for the school itself. It would be unfortunate if he were forced out for the sin of trying to elicit additional funds from a millionaire, who made an unsolicited $75,000 donation to the college.

But an independent investigation is ongoing. I will stand by the findings, as I hope the student activists will. There is a group on campus raising hell as only young people can.

Botstein, who is brilliant and brilliantly articulate, is conspicuously absent, or downplayed to the extent that I don’t see him mentioned anywhere in the Bard promotional material. I’m hoping he is not forced out of the festival altogether, as there is no one currently involved that could ever fill his shoes.

He’s still attached to this year’s opera production, which precedes the festival, as part of Bard SummerScape, a larger celebration of the arts that spans June 25-August 16. I already have my ticket to hear him conduct Richard Strauss’ “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen”). The opera runs July 24-August 2.

Furthermore, I will hear him at Carnegie Hall this Thursday, with vocal soloists and the American Symphony Orchestra, as he introduces and conducts Berlioz’s rarely-encountered edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz.”

One of the reasons I feel so disheartened by my own reaction to this year’s music festival – a reaction that I suspect will be shared by others attracted to Bard for its advocacy of unusual and neglected repertoire – is that I do not want the college to misconstrue my or anyone’s lack of enthusiasm and/or low attendance for distaste for, or protest against, Botstein.

Be that as it may, you’ll find the program, as it currently stands, at the links below. If you’re a Mozart nut, I hope you will consider attending.

Long live the Bard Music Festival. I’m hoping we’ll still have a few more years of Botstein, who will turn 80 in December, but appears to be as vital as ever, and in comparatively good health, at least on the evidence of what I’ve seen at Bard and at his concerts in New York City.

Next year, another neglected or underappreciated composer, please!

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Bard Music Festival

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/what-we-do/bard-music-festival/

Bard SummerScape, including Strauss’ “The Egyptian Helen”

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/what-we-do/summerscape/

April 13, 2026
Salieri Bard Fest Dates Announced

For Antonio Salieri’s birthday, an announcement of next year’s Bard Music Festival…

August 18, 2025
Salieri Beyond Amadeus The Real Story

In the words of Wilde’s Lord Henry, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

While it might be true there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it would be nice if Antonio Salieri could transcend his notoriety – as the alleged murderer of Mozart and a second-rate hack – to be recognized for some of his actual achievements. Especially since none of the charges leveled against him happen to be true!

I like “Amadeus” as much as the next guy, and while I am very happy it has served to keep Salieri’s name alive, and perhaps lent a greater degree of commercial viability to subsequent recordings of his music, it is worthwhile to examine the historical facts.

In reality, Salieri was a generous teacher, who fostered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and even Franz Xaver Mozart, his rival’s son, who was born a little more than four months before his father’s death.

Salieri himself was a prolific and successful composer. He wrote 37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces. While he was no Mozart – who was? – his music is finely crafted and often quite enjoyable, certainly no worse than that of a majority of his contemporaries.

Yes, Mozart believed Salieri and the Italian faction ensconced at the Viennese court (including future Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte) were against him. And there may have been something to it at first. However, beyond a rivalry pertaining to certain specific jobs, Mozart and Salieri appear often to have been better than cordial acquaintances.

The two even collaborated on a cantata, “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), rediscovered in 2016, a joint venture apparently entered into voluntarily (in contrast to an earlier contest, in which two one-act operas were juxtaposed, purely for the edification of the emperor). The cantata was written in 1785, to celebrate the recently-convalesced soprano Nancy Storace, who would soon create the role of Mozart’s Susanna in “The Marriage of Figaro.”

When Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, his first act was to revive “Figaro.” He was also responsible for arranging first performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 (K. 482), the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40. He was full of praise for “The Magic Flute.” And as I said, he took it upon himself to educate Mozart’s son.

Sadly, Salieri’s enormous compositional output gradually faded from memory already during the latter years of his life. Ironically, it is the scandalmongers who kept his name alive.

Rumors of Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death were codified by Alexander Pushkin in 1831, a few years after Salieri himself had passed, in the poetic drama “Mozart and Salieri.” This was later set as an opera, in 1898, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Peter Schaffer picked up the thread in 1979, when he wrote the play “Amadeus,” which of course was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film in 1984.

As the compact disc era progressed, more and more of Salieri’s output became available for first-hand assessment – and guess what? A lot of it is quite good!

Happy birthday, Patron Saint of Mediocrity!

Russian film version of Rimsky’s “Mozart and Salieri” (without subtitles):

In English, if a bit fuzzy:

Salieri’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra:

Overture to “Les Horaces”

“Das Lob der Musik” (“The Praise of Music”)

A Mozart and Salieri collaborative effort, the cantata “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia”

“I absolve you.”

August 18, 2021

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