Antonio Salieri’s Revenge – Falsely Cast as Mozart’s Murderer

A German-language biography of Salieri, by the composer and musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann, was published earlier this year. Lorenzo Da Ponte, the master librettist of “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni,” and “Così Fan Tutte,” heaped praise on Mozart’s music in his memoirs, but his evocation of Salieri’s personality was fonder in tone: “a most cultivated and intelligent man . . . whom I loved and esteemed both out of gratitude and by inclination . . . more than a friend, a brother to me.” Of the early Salieri operas that have returned to circulation, perhaps the finest is “La Scuola de’ Gelosi” (“The School of the Jealous”), which was first heard in Venice in 1778 and which conquered Vienna in 1783.

Source: www.newyorker.com