Hillary Clinton and Antonio Salieri have something in common: slandered, with too many people believing the false accusations unthinkingly, and the Russians have something to do with it. And also racism, nationalism and even a little bit of sexism thrown in to both stories for good measure.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is vastly overrated. Even a lot of those who defend Salieri fall into the trap of thinking that somehow Wolfgang’s music is greater than anyone else’s in some way that can be measured numerically.
For example, Alex Ross writes for the New Yorker that “Mozart was a greater composer, but not immeasurably greater.” Well, God damn it, say I, in an expression of blasphemy the real Antonio Salieri would not condone.
There are such things as trending analytics, and I do care about such statistics, but I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that whatever harmonically static ditty’s currently popular on Spotify is also better music than, for example, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 in A major (Beethoven’s Fourth also works for this example). Nor would I conclude that Ed Sheeran is a better songwriter than John Lennon.
If you have given both Salieri and Wolfgang an honest shot and conclude that you prefer Wolfgang Amadeus, that’s a valid opinion. But don’t think that that automatically means Wolfgang is better.
Though that is still better than having that opinion without actually listening to anything by Salieri.
However, Ross makes important points about how racism and nationalism helped create the myth of Mozart the genius and Salieri the mediocrity, jealous of the genius. That contrast is a myth.
And thus Ross gave me the impetus to finish and publish this article I started drafting three years ago in the tragic aftermath of the 2016 election. And another year passed.
It’s not that Wolfgang is objectively better than Salieri, it’s that Wolfgang is Austrian and Salieri’s Italian, and in some estimations Italians don’t count as real white people. Racists like Tucker Carlson think that only real white men can earn success; others require special pleading.
It reminds me of Hans Pfitzner saying that Beethoven is better than Mendelssohn not because Beethoven really is one of the greatest composers of all time, but because Beethoven is a non-Jewish German.
Other myths helped make Wolfgang into a phenomenon. Meanwhile, Salieri, who worked hard like so many other great but forgotten opera composers, lived to see the mythical Mozart’s star rise. Which led to yet another myth about Mozart, that Salieri’s false confession was a desperate ploy to ride the coattails of the fame that came with the Mozart mythology.
The Mozart mythology would not have been possible without Leopold Mozart, a brilliant composer, much better than his son, Wolfgang, in my opinion.
Leopold Mozart
Leopold Mozart also deserves credit for being the inventor of the concept of Wunderkinder. The original Wunderkinder were to be Leopold’s kids, Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus, the only two of seven to survive childhood.
Some history
The son of a bookbinder, Leopold Mozart would have, by tradition, also become a bookbinder. But he had different plans, which didn’t quite pan out, before finding success as a musician.
In 1747, Leopold Mozart married Anna Maria Pertl. Their first child to survive childhood was Maria Anna, known as “Nannerl,” who was born on July 30, 1751 (or maybe July 31, can’t say for sure). Her musical talent soon became evident, and at 13-years-old Leopold proudly regarded her as one of the best pianists in Europe.
Wolfgang was born on January 27, 1756. And sure he probably would have been musically inclined regardless of his family circumstances. But he was a lazy soul who would much have preferred to have been born to a prince or a robber baron, free to pursue music as one of several occasional hobbies.
Leopold and Maria Anna shaped Wolfgang into the perfect touring Wunderkind, who could grow up to be a man and a professional musician. Leopold toured both Maria Anna and Wolfgang, and they both impressed everyone who heard them play.
Maria Anna also wrote music, but none of it has survived. Once the little girl became a young woman, her filial duty was to marry a man her father approved of. Leopold stopped showcasing her talent on tour, and steered her to marry a bureaucrat. And so “Nannerl” went from extraordinary Wundermädchen to ordinary Hausfrau.
Maria Anna apparently no longer composed music, though presumably she continued to play the piano at home. So, as Wolfgang worked to derive his boring Symphony in C major, K. 551 from Michael Haydn’s best two C major symphonies, Maria Anna was busy raising her firstborn boy and about to be pregnant with a girl.
The theory has been floated around that maybe some of Maria Anna’s compositions have survived, but attributed to Wolfgang. The best of Wolfgang’s earliest compositions could very well actually be by Leopold or Maria Anna.
Marie Feret as Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart in Mozart's Sister.
While Leopold continued his duties to his employers, he curtailed his own musical projects to be as much of a stage dad as he could for Maria Anna and Wolfgang; and later just Wolfgang. When Wolfgang wanted to relax, Leopold would pressure him to complete compositions to fulfill obligations.
Beethoven didn’t always deliver on time either, but when he did deliver, he delivered tremendously impressive music. Beethoven’s String Quartet in E-flat major, Opus 127, is an underrated masterpiece still modern in Stravinsky’s estimation. Wolfgang’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major is a boring second installment of an ultimately unfulfilled obligation of three piano quartets which bores even music professors to sleep.
But we must give Wolfgang credit for his ability to take a model composition and derive a new composition in similar style that is technically not plagiarism. And he helped his elders when he could, such as by completing a set of violin and viola duos that Michael Haydn had started.
Meanwhile, in Venice, the recently orphaned Antonio Salieri came to the attention of Florian Gassmann, who was in town to oversee a production of his opera on a mythological subject. Afterwards, Gassmann took the young man to Vienna for a thorough musical education.
Salieri’s first big break came with an opportunity to pinch hit for Gassmann. Soon Salieri proved himself to be equally skilled at opera buffa and opera seria. Another big break came as an opportunity to pinch hit for Gluck in Paris with Les Danaïdes.
Salieri was too busy with his international success to care about the ambitious Wolfgang on his heels. But the Italian opera poets in Vienna weren’t too keen to help the young Austrian, and did what they could to ensure their compatriot’s success.
Of course that’s not how it looked to Leopold Mozart, who thought that Salieri had taken it upon himself to array a cabal against his son, who was obviously more talented in the proud father’s estimation. I think Leopold cared about this a heck of a lot more than Wolfgang did.
Wolfgang died barely years after Leopold. The surviving Mozarts of course blamed Salieri. But there was no evidence, not even circumstantial evidence.
F. Murray Abraham portrays a fictional mediocrity, slandering Antonio Salieri.
Salieri lived the rest of his life along the usual trajectory for Italian opera composers: worked hard for several years, then retired, unconcerned that his works faded from the repertoire, to be replaced by new younger composers’ works. And maybe some of them were young men for whom Salieri had paid Gassmann’s generosity forward.
The rumor that Salieri somehow poisoned Wolfgang also lived on. Then, as an infirm old man, Salieri, ravaged by senility, and supposedly wracked by guilt, supposedly confessed to murdering Wolfgang. The rumor of the confession was communicated to a deaf Beethoven in writing. I’m sure Beethoven immediately knew it to be false.
And even if Salieri did make that confession, he couldn’t have actually committed the crime. He lacked motive and opportunity. Nor could it have been a deliberate attempt to become a major figure in Mozart mythology.
Accusing Salieri of killing Mozart is like accusing Ed Sheeran of murdering some promising but not yet too well known rising star from Liverpool. Why would he do that? Not even if the up-and-comer’s genius was amazingly obvious, which it probably wouldn’t be anyway.
Ross writes that
Outside of chatter in the family circle, evidence for Salieri’s supposed machinations against [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart is scant. The story is unpersuasive in large measure because Salieri was in Paris for much of the time he was supposed to have been scheming in Vienna. Furthermore, he had a professional interest in supporting the kind of Italian opera that Mozart was producing.
…
Mozart could never understand why his creations sometimes failed to attract the admiration he knew they deserved, and he looked for conspiratorial explanations. … Mozart was not above scheming himself. Salieri must have had the sense that an ambitious up-and-comer was breathing down his neck.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean no one’s plotting against you. Ian Woodfield asserts the true mastermind behind the anti-Mozart cabal was Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, whom Ross characterizes as “a second-tier composer” who would be even more obscure if it wasn’t for his concerti for instruments like oboe and viola.
The Russian connection
Later on in the 19th Century, Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov would go on to perpetuate the myth that Salieri poisoned Wolfgang. The Russians would have preferred to exalt one of their own as a Wunderkind of obvious musical genius taken down by an evil foreigner, but an Austrian would do just as well for the purpose.
Ross writes that
The early nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalism in German-speaking countries. Salieri was typecast as a foreign interloper, an Italian intrigant—a pattern already visible in Leopold Mozart’s letters to his son. Herrmann perceptively points out the role that nationalism played in the marginalization of Salieri’s reputation: “The cosmopolitan composer, fluent in Italian, German and French and artistically significant in all three linguistic areas, could not be fully absorbed in any European nation. With the emergence of nation-states, the historical Salieri gradually became a homeless figure, and his great artistic and social merits eventually fell into oblivion.”
With Salieri’s music as forgotten as that of Antonio Vivaldi, it was easy to assume that his music was no good and deserved its oblivion in obscurity.
And so, the baseless accusations against Salieri were elevated to racist fairy tales, like the stories of Mexican immigrants who cross the border illegally for the express purpose of killing young white girls.
But it was Hollywood that really amplified the slander against Salieri with the dreadful movie Amadeus. The soundtrack has plenty of music by Wolfgang, and next to nothing by Salieri. The IMDb page doesn’t even credit Salieri for any music at all.
Evaluating the music on its own merits
In his Amadeus screenplay, Peter Shaffer actually writes the following:
INT. OPERA HOUSE - NIGHT - 1780'S
Salieri conducting the last scene from Axur: King of Ormus.
On stage we see a big scene of acclamation: the hero and
heroine of the opera accepting the crown amidst the rejoicing
of the people. The decor and costumes are mythological
Persian. The music is utterly conventional and totally
uninventive.
Are you serious right now? Who is that information for? The director so he can tell the soundtrack composer to write a boring version of music that was already written two centuries ago?
Or is Peter Shaffer a failed music critic who fell back on writing slanderous screenplays about long dead composers?
When you listen attentively to music without knowing who the composer is, and without being told the composer is a genius or a mediocrity, you will either like the music or you won’t.
And other people who listen to the same composition in the same performance with the same ignorance of the author’s name might come to different conclusions.
Quoting Ross again:
The danger of the word “genius” is that it implies an almost biological category—an innately superior being, a superhero. It is probably no accident that the category of “genius,” an obsession of the nineteenth century, coincided with the emergence of the pseudoscience of race, which held that certain peoples were genetically fitter than others. At the same time, “genius” easily becomes a branding term used to streamline the selling of cultural goods. The perils of the term become clear when the authorship of a work is uncertain. In 1987, the musicologist John Spitzer published an amusing and edifying article about the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b, which was long thought to be by Mozart. In its heyday, the Sinfonia was said to be “truly Mozartean” and as “monumental as a palace courtyard.” Once uncertainty about the attribution set in, the piece was called “cheap and repetitive.” The notes themselves had not changed.
My emphasis at the end. The K. 297b “is a lovely but somewhat inert piece,” according to Ross.
Getting dropped from the repertoire just because of a changed attribution is a fate that has befallen much better music, like Michael Haydn’s Symphony in G major, Perger 25, once known as Wolfgang’s No. 37, K. 444, or Friedrich Witt’s Jena Symphony, once known as Beethoven’s Jena Symphony.
A lot of people can’t tell the difference between Salieri’s music and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s, at least when we’re taking 30- or 60-second excerpts from their works and putting them side by side.
And they also have trouble distinguishing Leopold Mozart’s music from that of his son. One big hint: if you hear a big horn part with lots of high notes, Leopold is probably the composer.
Another clue is when the music is tiresome with lots of repeats, it's probably by Wolfgang Amadeus. Take for instance the “Alte Lambacher” Symphony in G major, K. 45a, Anhang 221. In the past, lots of people believed it was by Leopold, and I believe that as well in the present.
It’s an excellent composition and I think it sounds much more like other compositions credited to Leopold than like Wolfgang’s later music.
Then there is the “Neue Lambach” Symphony in G major, which no one doubts was written by Wolfgang. The “Alte” is short and sweet, less than 15 minutes. The “Neue” drags on for more than 22 minutes, a pale shadow of the “Alte.”
In general, Wolfgang would take a great piece by one of his elders as a model, and produce something of longer duration and less energy. Listen to either of Michael Haydn’s Symphonies in C major with a fugue at the end (Perger 19 or Perger 31) and then listen to Wolfgang’s tedious and plodding Symphony in C major, K. 551.
Or maybe listen to both Perger 19 and Perger 31 and follow with K. 551. It’s a playlist that would probably show that Michael Haydn’s music is often played way too fast, as if to get it over with quickly, and Wolfgang’s is sometimes played way too slow, out of misplaced reverence.
Of course it’s more profitable for companies like Bärenreiter to say the “Alte” is by Wolfgang than by Leopold Mozart.
Speaking of playlists, I’ve made a couple of Spotify playlists. The first of these, Greatest Hits: Salieri, I would like to rename “Greatest Hits, Do maggiore: Salieri” (though I haven’t looked at the score of Il Ricco d’un Giorno). The second is Greatest Hits in Re: Salieri, for music in D minor or in D major.
The second playlist ends with the charming Symphony in D major “La Veneziana,” which reminds me of Leopold Mozart’s delightful Symphony in D major, Eisen D6, and which I’m nicknaming “La Veneziana.”
I also included Salieri’s Organ Concerto in C major in my Spotify playlist Unexpected Soloists, which also includes my short and hopefully also sweet Celesta Concerto in A-flat minor in a computer-generated performance. As I admitted earlier, I do care about trending analytics, and I hope you’ll help my numbers. Ten streams and I’ll feel like Ed Sheeran with ten million streams.
And I also included Salieri’s Les Danaïdes Overture in a playlist suggesting a programme with Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor for a concert with Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 0 in D minor.
Today, on the occasion of Salieri’s 270th birthday, let’s recognize the racist Russian fairy tale for what it is. And let us acknowledge that Salieri’s a much better composer than he has gotten credit for.
