“HAVE QUOTES ABOUT SALIERI”

U.S. novelist David Weiss (1909-2002) developed several deep abiding interests across his long life and sometimes meandering writing career. These passions included President Franklin Roosevelt-era public works projects, his own family history (he was an orphan largely raised by an aunt), secular Judaism, his hometown of Philadelphia, and the writing and career of poet and playwright Stymean Karlen, who also happened to be his wife and creative partner. It was, however, none of these topics that had brought me to the Special Collections Reading Room at Temple University’s Charles Library during a rainy week in August 2024. Instead, I was on the trail of Weiss’s writing about a long-debunked musical conspiracy theory. 

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University. All photos provided by the author.

One of Weiss’s other lifelong fascinations was the life, music, and posthumous reception of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Across his career as a biographical novelist, Weiss wrote three novels inspired by Mozart, two of which—Sacred and Profane (1968) and The Assassination of Mozart (1970/1971)—were published near the height of his career and achieved moderate international success. Having read these novels for fun some years ago, I was curious to learn more about his research and writing process. As a postdoctoral researcher working on the interplay of fact and fiction in the reception history of Mozart’s colleague (and alleged rival) Antonio Salieri, I was interested in examining Weiss’s research notes and outlines for The Assassination of Mozart to learn three things. First, I was curious as to whether or not he actually believed in the anachronistic and convoluted scenario he laid out in the novel, in which the Viennese secret police colluded with Salieri to poison Mozart for political reasons. Secondly, I wanted to better understand how Weiss engaged with historical sources that had long discounted most speculation about Mozart’s death as conspiratorial and sensational. Finally, given how much of Salieri’s twentieth-and twenty first-century reception has been shaped by Miloš Forman’s 1984 Oscar-winning film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (now also currently under production as a limited series by Sky TV), I wondered how Weiss and his publisher pitched this story in the decade before the play’s 1979 premiere.¹ 

David Weiss Papers, Box 4. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

My visit to Philadelphia was something of a whirlwind. I had planned on taking two days to make my way through the thirty-seven meticulously organized archival boxes that Weiss had donated to his alma mater. Unfortunately, a severe thunderstorm led to the initial cancellation of my flight from Toronto and I had to rebook the next day, thus cramming everything into one very long day at the library. This included taking notes on which boxes and folders contained what kinds of documents: personal and professional correspondence, drafts and typed manuscripts, reviews, research notes, and contracts. I also took some time to read as much as I could of Weiss’s numerous unpublished books, including a memoir, a biography of his partner Karlen, and a peculiar novel in which an irritated Mozart returns to life to interfere with a production of one of his operas in the early 1990s.² More chaotically, I found myself frantically photographing everything that seemed even somewhat relevant to my project, from proofreaders’ comments to a Japanese radio play based on The Assassination of Mozart. 

Japanese Radio Play, The Assassination of Mozart. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

While Weiss’s papers do have a thorough finding aid, I was still so overwhelmed with the need to get through his papers that I went about things in a less strategic manner than I might have otherwise done. About an hour before the reading room closed, I came across the folders that yielded what I was exactly there for: the research notes and outlines for Assassination. I already knew that Weiss was familiar with the major names in Anglophone Mozart scholarship and works in translation from the early and mid-twentieth century. Both Sacred and Profane and Assassination end with detailed bibliographies of seemingly everything Weiss consulted in his research: musicology, biography, and music criticism, political histories of eighteenth-century Vienna, and even cookbooks and other works of historical fiction. If nothing else, he was clearly a voracious reader who wished to absorb as many details as possible. But looking at the notes and manuscripts behind these novels further fleshed out Weiss’s choice of subject matter and writing process. 

Weiss’s unpublished memoir and biography of Karlen told a thrilling story about the research trip the two of them undertook for Sacred and Profane. Upon learning that he planned on writing about Mozart and wanted to travel to Salzburg and Vienna, Weiss’s agent obtained a letter of introduction for Weiss and Karlen to various European music scholars from none other than the celebrity conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. It was on this trip that Weiss began to ponder the circumstances of Mozart’s death, particularly his infamously unknown burial place. He claimed that a conversation with Karlen while visiting St. Marx Cemetery in Vienna solidified his belief in the longstanding rumor that Mozart did not die of natural causes.³ When a planned major press junket surrounding Sacred and Profane was apparently sidelined by media coverage of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination, Weiss decided to put his idle speculation about the mystery of Mozart’s death into a sort of sequel to what had otherwise been a straightforward biographical narrative ending with his subject’s burial. As a typed blurb for Assassination noted, Weiss seemed to imply a connection between the complex landscape of late eighteenth-and-early nineteenth-century Europe and the fraught politics of mid-twentieth-century America.⁴  

Typed blurb for The Assassination of Mozart. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

The research notes and outlines for Assassination revealed the methodological process of how an author who did not otherwise consider himself a writer of mysteries or thrillers transformed notes from a variety of historical sources into a fictional plot. Weiss was, above all things, a writer of fictionalized biography, and he treated the plotting of this novel in much the same way as he treated the research for his more mainstream works, consulting letters and scholarship to assemble a narrative based on where his real and fictional people would likely be at various points in 1825, the year of Salieri’s death.⁵ For someone familiar with the broader literature of scholarship, fiction, and semi-fictional anecdotes about Salieri, however, Weiss’s notes were a fascinating, if frustrating, look at how someone already convinced of a conspiracy theory reads non-conspiratorial sources.⁶ Where something was not explicitly spelled out in his sources, Weiss floated various ideas—reasons for a plot against a particular operatic performance, potential means of murder, various other figures who might be in on the intrigue, and ways his protagonists and their allies might be prevented by the authorities from revealing the “truth” to the general public. A small file of papers labeled “poisons” quoted extensively from medical literature on the history and symptoms of arsenic, reminding me of some present-day mystery novelists who joke about their own disturbing Google search histories.

Outline for The Assassination of Mozart. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center. Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

My favorite source, however, was more general, a typed and handwritten list of major plot events, locations, and the historical figures Weiss’s protagonists would interview, followed by some additional notes on the novel’s planned structure. He initially planned a posthumous conversation among Haydn’s, Mozart’s, and Beethoven’s ghosts, which sadly did not make it into the final novel. But an additional note reminded me that Weiss was aware that the story he was writing would be largely unfamiliar to his mostly American and British readership. In one note to himself midway down the page, he typed “HAVE QUOTES ABOUT SALIERI in place of a frontspiece [sic] to show historical nature of story.” Besides joking with friends that “HAVE QUOTES ABOUT SALIERI” would be a good title for my current project, Weiss’s note to himself demonstrates the balance of fact, claim, and outright fiction in the project of writing historical crime fiction. He needed to construct a narrative that seemed to him (and hopefully to his readers) historically plausible. That he appeared to fundamentally disagree with the scholarly consensus on Mozart and Salieri was only a minor (to him) concern and one which he clearly hoped would attract attention and debate in the press for The Assassination of Mozart and potential future works.⁷ In this, he was ironically in the same boat as Peter Shaffer, whose first edition of the much-revised script to Amadeus contains additional details about Salieri and Viennese political and music history that would have been largely unknown to initial audiences but are often cut in more recent productions.⁸ For both writers, in order to get audiences to engage with their largely invented and potentially obscure musical claims, they first had to share some basic historical facts. 

1. While Weiss’s archived personal and professional writings never mention Peter Shaffer by name or acknowledge the play Amadeus, he strongly disliked the film, which (somewhat to my surprise) he saw as overly sympathetic to Salieri and presenting Mozart as too politically and artistically naïve. Nevertheless, Weiss clearly hoped throughout the 1980s and 1990s that the increased pop culture interest in Mozart might lead to additional publication and adaptation opportunities for his own work. His third Mozart-themed novel (unpublished in English, although he did negotiate the rights for a Hungarian edition) contains a scene where a revived Mozart is infuriated by a film screening of Amadeus. Curiously, both Shaffer and Weiss seemed to share an interest in drawing verbatim from historical sources and presenting a sort of “secret history” approach to their historical subjects. For more on Shaffer’s perspective on historical fiction, see his essay “Preface: Amadeus: The Final Encounter“ in Amadeus (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), xv–xxxiv. I discuss Weiss’s use of sources in my article “‘Everything You’ve Heard is True: Resonating Musicological Anecdotes in Crime Fiction about Antonio Salieri,” Journal of Historical Fictions 4, no. 1 (2022): 41-60, available at https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/jhf-2022-4.1.pdf
2. The unpublished Mozart novel—existing in multiple full and partial drafts in the Weiss papers with various titles, including If Mozart Came Back, Forever and After, and Mozart: An Encore—is quite a departure from Weiss’s typical approach to historical and biographical fiction. With a character clearly modeled on Weiss himself—a moderately successful author from Philadelphia who befriends Mozart while engaged to ghostwrite the memoirs of a popular but arrogant conductor (to whom Mozart takes an immediate dislike and who is pointedly described in much the same way as Salieri is in Assassination)—much of the novel clearly reflects the author’s personal views on the state of opera and popular culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some drafts also have more supernatural, dreamlike scenes wherein Mozart (from his new vantage point in the late twentieth century) speaks back across time and space to his wife, son, and various contemporaries including Haydn, Salieri, and Lorenzo Da Ponte in an attempt to make sense of his posthumous legacy.
3. As Weiss tells it, he was more swept up in the possibilities of foul play, while Karlen was more skeptical, a dynamic mirrored in the characters of Jason and Deborah Otis (the American protagonists of Assassination).
4. For a variety of scholarly perspectives on the speculation and narratives surrounding Mozart’s death and posthumous reception, see H.C. Robbins Landon, 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (Schirmer, 1988), William Stafford, The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment (Stanford University Press, 1991), Mark Everist, Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012), Simon Keefe, Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Keefe, Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Edmund Goehring, Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art (University of Rochester Press, 2024). For more historically grounded discussion of Antonio Salieri’s career during the 1780s and 1790s, see Volkmar Braunbehrens, Maligned Master: The Real Story of Antonio Salieri (Fromm, 1992), John Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Morio, 2019).
5. One of Weiss’s acknowledged sources, The Mozart Handbook (The World Publishing Company, 1954), clearly provided a grounding in a variety of primary and secondary sources, including excerpts from Emily Anderson’s well-known English translations of the Mozart family letters and then-fairly recent critical and biographical scholarship by Edward Dent, Alfred Einstein, and Eric Blom (among many others). While much of this work is considered dated today, it strikes me that it likely shaped some elements of Weiss’s characterizations of certain people in Mozart’s family and social circles. While none of the sources that editor Louis Biancolli includes subscribe to any conspiracy theories about Mozart’s death, many depict Salieri (often without citation) as politically minded, staunchly opposed to German music, and quick to take offense in ways that verge on the speculative.
6. I am reminded here of what rhetorician Jenny Rice calls “the power of empty archives,” wherein conspiracy theorists will latch onto the idea of missing, forged, rumored, censored, or otherwise unavailable sources in order to read between the lines of existing documentary evidence and official narratives. Jenny Rice, Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (The Ohio State University Press, 2020).
7. While the reviews for Assassination were decidedly mixed and Weiss struggled to publish his later attempts at music-themed fiction, he saved numerous articles and press clippings related to speculation about Mozart’s death.
8. For example, the first published version of the Amadeus script includes a scene where the success of Salieri’s opera Axur, re d’Ormus is explicitly contrasted against Joseph II’s political anxieties and Mozart’s professional failures. Peter Shaffer, Amadeus (London: Deutsch, 1980). (Note that while the script was first published in 1980, the play premiered in 1979.) Although the premiere of Axur is included in a very different context in Forman’s film (wherein Mozart’s mockery of Salieri’s music reinforces his sense of artistic inferiority and religious betrayal), this scene appears to have been cut from most later productions and subsequent editions of the published script. Beyond Shaffer’s own revisions and personal involvement in subsequent professional productions of the play until his death in 2016, more recent theatrical cuts tend to emphasize specific production and casting choices. For example, the production that I saw in Salzburg last year—which was part of the Salieri-themed 2024 Mozartwoche festival and emphasized a “Mozart as rockstar” image—shifted the play’s focus from the musical politics of the 18th century to the destructiveness of contemporary celebrity culture. It minimized the historical setting through deliberate choices in costuming (the cast was in various types of modern formal dress in the 1780s/90s scenes, with the aged Salieri dressed as a fading celebrity hiding from paparazzi in an oversized coat, hat, sunglasses, and wig in 1823) and use of deliberate anachronism (Mozart’s mimed performances occasionally included air guitar and jumping on top of a piano-shaped set piece, while Salieri “live-streamed” his confessional monologues into a camera that projected a digital image to the back of the theater). Most of the specific historical and musical allusions in the 19th-century frame story were also cut.