Time has not been kind to Antonio Salieri, the Italian composer and contemporary of Mozart. “Salieri is one of history’s all-time losers,” The New Yorker’s Alex Ross wrote in 2019, summing up perceptions of the man as a humorless, envious enemy—and possibly even the killer—of his more famous counterpart.
“Ross’s article offers some persuasive alibis for Salieri, but it goes beyond the accusations to reassess the composer’s unfairly forgotten music and professional influence,” Nathan Burstein writes. (Ross counts Schubert and Rossini among the composers in debt to Salieri, along with Beethoven—a former student of Salieri’s who briefly feuded with his teacher over a charity benefit.) In contrast to the image of a dour villain evoked after his death, Salieri seems to have been likable and honorable, with views on gender and race that were notably, if imperfectly, ahead of their time. Rather than a killer, Salieri has been a victim: “a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip,” Ross writes. Revisit the full story: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/anto...
