The Salieri Rumor and Why Gossip Matters

In April 1824, a curious rumor made its way into the newspapers of Paris. Following a performance of selections from Mozart’s Requiem, the Gazette de France reported:

Before the opening of this concert, it circulated in the hall, as positive news, that Salieri had come to accuse himself on his deathbed of having poisoned Mozart in an outburst of appalling jealousy! We recount this news without, however, having much faith in it, since for a long time the author of Les Danaïdes has been struck with a form of mental alienation, of which this voluntary revelation is only the sad and latest effect.¹

This story is, of course, familiar to anyone who has seen Amadeus, although you may be surprised to see it being told so early, hundreds of miles from Vienna. Antonio Salieri was still alive at the time. Some of his students, including Franz Liszt, were still concertizing in Paris, and you could easily go see Les Danaïdes for yourself, as his French operas remained in the Parisian repertoire far longer than his German or Italian operas did in Vienna. The story that Salieri murdered Mozart had not yet become the stuff of novels, theater, and film, nor had it joined the list of misconceptions that those of us teaching music history and appreciation often devote time to debunking. In 1824 it was simply musical gossip, with multiple journalists and members of the public weighing in on the lives and careers of fairly recent celebrities.

The strange reception history of Antonio Salieri’s life and career shows how the same piece of gossip can reflect an immediate historical context but also adopt a variety of shifting (and often historically contradictory) meanings. In musicology, “reception history” refers to the history of how a piece of music or body of musical work was received by different audiences after the composer’s lifetime and/or in different contexts from what they originally intended. For example, the reception history of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni includes the 19th-century concept of the Byronic hero, the rise of psychoanalytic interpretations of art, the development of filmed opera and Regietheater in the 20th century, and the #MeToo movement of the 21st century—which are all pretty far removed from the opera’s original creation and performance, but still inform how people interpret the opera.

Many of the things that made Salieri successful during his lifetime — international popular appeal, bureaucratic connections, administrative competence, and a “who’s who” of students (including Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven) — put his historical reception at a disadvantage when the Romantic period changed our ideas of what a “great composer” should be.² Meanwhile, Salieri’s “story” — even in supposedly nonfictional writing — became almost completely removed from his music and instead focused on speculation about his life, often relying on partially or wholly fictionalized anecdotes, claims, and conversations.

A case in point is Edward Wilberforce’s 1866 biography of Franz Schubert. Though the book is mostly a condensed translation of Heinrich von Kreissle’s biography from the previous year, Wilberforce’s chapter on Salieri departs from Kreissle’s in some significant ways. Kreissle’s work has meticulous citations, with references to surviving firsthand accounts and the current biographical literature; Wilberforce eliminates most of these citations in favor of a more speculative approach.³ He frames Salieri as a limiting influence from which the young Salieri would eventually seek independence. “The master,” Wilberforce wrote, “was devoted to Italian tradition; the scholar [Schubert] was making himself a new path through the thick of German romanticism.”⁴ Wilberforce exaggerates Salieri’s disapproval of German and Austrian composers, arguing without evidence that Salieri and Schubert eventually parted ways over the former’s corrections “of all the passages that savoured of Haydn or Mozart.”⁵ By linking Haydn (who was nearly twenty years older than Salieri) and Mozart (whose alleged rivalry with Salieri largely revolved around Italian-language opera) to “the thick of German romanticism” alongside Beethoven and Schubert, Wilberforce ahistorically places Salieri in opposition to those canonical late 18th- and early 19th-century composers with whom his readers would have been more familiar. Wilberforce also introduces the idea that Salieri’s generous support of the young Schubert was a kind of atonement for his earlier intrigues against Mozart:

To all, except Mozart, he [Salieri] was friendly and pleasant; but Mozart’s superiority was too evident to allow Salieri any rest; and the intrigues by which he hindered the rise of so great a genius reflect lasting discredit upon him… His shameful conduct towards Mozart was partly atoned for by his appreciation of Schubert, whom he instructed to the best of his ability, and admired with all his powers.⁶

Wilberforce’s analysis of Salieri’s teaching career slips between what is known about his pedagogical methods and theories that, while plausible, are unprovable. This focus on the slipperiness between documented fact and any potentially possible rumor (however unlikely) undergirds many famous rumors, conspiracy theories, and pseudohistories and provides a kind of non-evidentiary evidence, what rhetorician Jenny Rice calls “the power of the empty archives.”⁷ The presence of an “empty archive” for a historical person or event does not mean that an actual archival record is lacking, as many conspiracy theories form around heavily documented people or events. Moon landing conspiracy theorists, as Rice notes, cling to probable forgeries claiming to fill in the gaps in the documented narrative, despite the participation of thousands of people at all levels of the space program and affiliated industries worldwide in the Apollo program. Anti-Stratfordians emphasize a supposed lack of biographical support for William Shakespeare’s life and career, when in fact we know far more about Shakespeare than about many other people of his time, place, and social station. 

Salieri’s reception history has its own empty archive of false, misleading, dubious, and unsupported evidence, beginning with the earliest known written records linking him to the rumors of Mozart’s “murder” in French newspapers from the 1820s and through fiction, poetry, and conspiratorial speculation that continues in some form to the present day.⁸ An 1815 diary entry from German art collector Sulpiz Boisserée claims that Salieri paid 20,000 florins of his wife’s inheritance to sabotage Mozart’s operas. But Boisserée learned this gossip secondhand from one Kapellmeister Detouche, and his letter contains “several errors of fact.”⁹ A more well-known document with a similar reliance on gossip and second- and thirdhand knowledge is Edmond Michotte’s La Visite de Wagner à Rossini, a dialogue between Richard Wagner and Gioachino Rossini supposedly transcribed live by Michotte in 1860 but not published until 1906. While discussing his time in Vienna in the early 1820s, Rossini mentions Salieri’s alleged rivalry with and poisoning of Mozart. Wagner interjects that “still, in my time, that rumor persisted in Vienna,” with Rossini going on to claim that he had actually teased Salieri about the rumor, joking that Beethoven’s famous withdrawal from society was out of “an instinct for self-preservation.”¹⁰ While it is clear that neither Rossini nor Wagner (at least in Michotte’s account) took the rumor seriously as historical fact, the rumor had real currency as a rumor—a way to showcase one’s musical knowledge and connections. 

This all has broader repercussions when it comes to how and what one learns about history and biography inside and outside of the classroom, how new historical discoveries are reported on in the media, and how we as scholars engage with pop history and historical fiction. For example, when popular narratives center on Salieri’s relationships with his more canonical colleagues and students, they reinforce a longstanding Romantic narrative of musicality focused on the artistry of men who made their livings as professional composers. This in turn neglects the careers of Salieri’s numerous female students (including Catarina Cavalieri, Maria Theresia von Paradis, and Marianna von Auenbrugger), as well as the broader dynamics of gender and class, and the blurred distinctions between professional and amateur musicians in the late 18th and early 19th century.¹¹ Historicizing both the facts and the gossip in music history allows us a more nuanced conversation about not just what we think we know about a particular figure or work, but also what (and who) gets left out entirely.

Debunking spurious rumors and anecdotes can often feel like a boring and somewhat routine task. Nobody — least of all musicologists and music biographers (most of whom presumably care very deeply about our own investments in both history and music) — wants to reduce the human beings of music history to dry lists of facts. And scholarly reactions to public (mis)understandings of music history run the risk of telling people to stop enjoying things. As Linda Shaver-Gleason once observed:

Since I threw myself into the business of debunking myths, I’m at risk of being the pedant who derails an interesting conversation with, “Well, actually…” Sometimes I worry I’m so caught up in correcting misconceptions about music that I give the impression I don’t actually like it. That’s motivated me to write more than just corrections, to explain why the history matters and hopefully replace the warm fuzzies of a feel-good false narrative with an awed appreciation for history.¹²

Thinking about how false information spreads can also inform how and why we talk about biography in the classroom and elsewhere. This goes beyond dispelling specific misconceptions; it should encourage us all to think critically about how we evaluate sources and expertise in educating ourselves and others about history. As we’ve probably all seen with more contemporary misinformation and disinformation, it isn’t enough to simply assert that a thing isn’t true or can’t possibly be true. The opening scene of the 2016–17 National Theatre production of Amadeus evocatively links historical and current experiences of gossip as a social phenomenon.¹³ The scene is ostensibly set in 1823 and typically features a group of representative “Citizens of Vienna” gossiping about the now-aged Salieri. In this production, however, the temporal setting is not so clear. An orchestra, dressed in modern concert black, walks onstage, warming up for a rehearsal. Two musicians (later revealed to be the gossipy Venticelli siblings, played here by Sarah Amankwah and Hammed Animashaun) take out their phones and begin scrolling while exchanging Shaffer’s lines, as if reading them from a Twitter thread. By emphasizing the similarities between the “fake news” of the 1820s and today,  director Michael Longhurst and designer Chloe Lamford consider this historical gossip about Salieri less as a hook for Shaffer’s philosophical questions about fame and genius and more as a question of what kinds of (mis)information we are still all too willing to accept.

1. Gazette de France, April 15, 1824, p. 1 (my translation), as quoted in Helmut Jacobs, “Mozart empoisonné! Extraits de la presse parisienne sur la propagation d’une rumeur au milieu des années 1820,” Revue de Musicologie 91.2 (2005): 455–68 [originally published in German as “Das Gerücht von Mozarts Vergiftung and seine Literarisierung. Neu entdeckte Dokumente aus den Pariser Zeitungen des Jahres 1824,” Acta Mozartiana (2004), 3–35].
2. Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Halle: Morio, 2019); Ellen Stokes, “Holding Musical Court in Vienna: Antonio Salieri and his Retention of Power as Europe’s Most Infamous Imperial Kapellmeister,” presentation at the Chigiana Journal’s December 2021 conference on Music and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century.
3. Edward Wilberforce, Franz Schubert: A Musical Biography from the German of Dr. Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn (London: William H. Allen and Co., 1866), 1–19; Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, Franz Schubert (Vienna: Gerold, 1865), 1–32.
4. Wilberforce, Franz Schubert, 18–19.
5. Ibid., 19.
6. Ibid., 17–18.
7. Jenny Rice, Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 99.
8. For analyses and debunkings of the Mozart poisoning conspiracy theory, see H.C. Robbins Landon, 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (New York: Schirmer, 1988); William Stafford, The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Volkmar Braunbehrens, Maligned Master: The Real Story of Antonio Salieri (New York: Fromm International Publishing, 1992); Simon Keefe, “Between Fact and Fiction, Scholarly and Popular: Peter Shaffer and Miloš Forman’s Amadeus at 25,” Musical Times 150 (Spring 2009): 45–53;  Renato Calza, “Salieri e Mozart: Una storia lunga due secoli, fra leggenda e realtà,” in Francesco Passadore, ed., Antonio Salieri: La carriera di un musicista fra storia e leggenda (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2017), 211–93; and Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Halle: Morio, 2019).
9. Otto Deutsch, Mozart: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel: Bärenreiter), translated into English by Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble as Mozart: A Documentary Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 515–16 (quotation on 516).
10. Edmond Michotte,  La Visite de R. Wagner à Rossini (Paris 1860) (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1906), 25–26 (my translation).
11. For further examples of scholarship tracing how women’s contributions to and exclusion from the biographical and reception narratives surrounding canonical male composers in this period, see Tom Beghin, The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff, eds, Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018).
12. Linda Shaver-Gleason, “Not Another Music History Blog!” Musicology Now, Dec. 23, 2016. If any readers are unfamiliar with Shaver-Gleason’s blog, Not Another Music History Cliché, please spend some time reading it! In addition to providing thoughtful criticism and context for many more recent instances of musical gossip, Linda was also a devoted champion of questioning accepted wisdom and received narratives within both academic and public musicology.
13. I was fortunate to watch the streamed recording of this production during the National Theatre at Home series in 2020. It is now available through the NT at Home subscription service.