“I will tell you of Salieri’s cabals”: Conspiratorial Thought and the Intriguing Afterlives of Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) occupies a strange place in historical, biographical, and popular understandings of late eighteenth-century European art music.Despite a lengthy and successful career as a composer of large-scale theatrical and sacred works, teacher of composition and voice, and administrator in the vast Habsburg musical bureaucracy, he is undoubtedly best known for his dubious status as Mozart's rival.Indeed, in the decades immediately following his death, Salieri quickly became a highly contested fictionalized character in the international literature, with plays, operas, and short fiction dramatizing his relationship with Mozart and arguing for or against his place in music history.Within musicology, reception histories tend to focus on changing views of particular musical works in different historical and cultural settings.How, then, can one speak of the reception of a composer more remembered for debunked gossip around murder and envy than for his actual compositions?Since the 1970s, much musicological ink has been spilled attempting reassessing Salieri's musical contributions and broader impact. 1 My paper for the Eighteenth-Century Afterlives Spring Workshop does not aim to relitigate the truth or falsehood of the many conflicting claims surrounding Salieri's career.Rather, I more closely examine how the meanings attached to Salieri's alleged "intrigues" or "cabals" have shifted over time and in subsequent fictional retellings.The allegation originated in the Mozart family letters, wherein both Mozart and his father Leopold occasionally mention plots against Mozart's operas supposedly led by the far more established Salieri. 2 In the context of the 1780s and 1790s, however, the terms clearly referred to the normal politicking and networking involved with the business of opera in Vienna, which could involve collaboration and competition across a vast array of composers, poets, singers, theater managers, censors, and other professionals. 3During the decades following Mozart's death, however, biographers and critics attempting to make sense of Mozart's life and early death increasingly saw his rivalry with Salieri in terms of an aesthetic dispute, whether between Italian-and German-language opera (as in Albert Lortzing's 1834 opera Szenen aus Mozarts Leben) or between Salieri's professional successes during his lifetime and the emergent

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