In search of a lost reputation

Why is Antonio Salieri like Richard III?

Because the man he was has disappeared behind the villain of a hit play that will not die.

Richard Plantagenet at least has a political action committee -- the Richard III Society (www.richardiii.net) -- patiently laboring to clear his name. What efforts there are on Salieri’s behalf -- for instance, “Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera,” a magisterial study by John A. Rice -- proceed without benefit of any master plan.

And so, thanks to Milos Forman’s film of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” (named best picture of 1984 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ranked 53rd on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time), Salieri haunts the popular imagination in the reptilian likeness of F. Murray Abraham, gorging on sweets, blind with rage at the sight of Mozart’s celestial manuscripts, humiliated by his rival’s genius, tortured unto madness by his own mediocrity.

Shaffer was not the first to suggest a deadly enmity between the composers. Mozart himself rang the bell, muttering suspicions that Salieri had tried to poison him. More than three decades after Mozart’s death in 1791, Salieri is said to have made a confession to the same effect, but the evidence is shaky and few historians believe that the confession (if Salieri really made it) was true.

Salieri died in 1825, but the rumors lived on. In 1830, Aleksandr Pushkin brought out his verse drama “Mozart and Salieri,” which perpetuates the story of the poisoning. In 1897, Rimsky-Korsakov set Pushkin’s “little tragedy” to music, assigning Mozart to a tenor and Salieri to a baritone. These Russian trifles are little remembered now, yet perhaps they played their part in keeping the old legend alive. Lost from view has been Salieri the respected professional: protege of the magisterial Gluck, teacher of the immortal Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. In addition to more than 40 operas, the authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians cites more than 100 vocal works by Salieri, both sacred and secular, plus symphonic and chamber pieces and a treatise on the art of singing. Does any of this music stand a chance?

Well, its prospects are looking up, especially in opera, which was Salieri’s principal domain. In recent years, CDs and DVDs have brought several of his operas back into circulation. And in December, the fabled Teatro alla Scala of Milan gave the composer an even bigger boost, opening its new season with the long-forgotten “Europa Riconosciuta” (Europa’s Identity Revealed). Riccardo Muti, who conducted, observes: “A critic in a Communist newspaper complained that we were glorifying a reactionary composer. What does that mean? Salieri did not have the divine simplicity of Mozart. But he was a true musician, with a master’s craft.”

A mercurial panache

The premiere of the new “Europa Riconosciuta” was carried live on a closed-circuit telecast, so a commercial video seems very much in the realm of realistic expectation. But for now, the best jumping-off point for listeners curious about Salieri is the new Arthaus Musik DVD of “Tarare” -- the greatest hit of his lifetime.

Students of opera may have encountered this title, which comes into discussions of Mozart by way of its libretto. Like the play “The Marriage of Figaro”(1784), the source for what many regard as Mozart’s supreme operatic creation, it is from the pen of the resourceful Frenchman Pierre Beaumarchais. Having opened to a deafening buzz in 1787, it proved the smash of pre-Revolutionary Paris, and its vogue continued through the first quarter of the 19th century. The video documents a bicentennial production mounted by the Schwetzinger Festspiele in Germany in 1998 -- still the sole revival of modern times.

Like “Figaro,” “Tarare” tells a tale of class, sex and power, but a crueler one. Enraged by the happiness of his general Tarare, a paragon of virtue, the tyrant Atar sets out to destroy him, not only arranging the abduction of Tarare’s wife, Astasie, but also conspiring with the high priest to have him stripped of his command. Many plot twists later, the army rallies behind Tarare, who reminds them of their allegiance to Atar. But Atar would rather die than owe his throne to his vassal. In a pique, he stages a public suicide, and the soldiers crown their reluctant hero.

“Tarare” boldly combines tragic pathos and spicy balletic slapstick, and Salieri’s mercurial panache enhances the action at every turn, with music for the orchestra that is every bit as kaleidoscopic as his music for voices. The pomp of drums and trumpets, the channeled lightning of the strings, the sweet to nasal timbres of the winds -- all these colors and textures are at his fingertips.

Apart from an overextended divertissement in a harem, Salieri also knows when to slow the pace and when to let it accelerate. Under the direction of Jean-Louis Martinoty and the baton of Jean-Claude Malgoire, the cast -- led by Howard Crook (Tarare), Jean-Philippe Lafont (Atar), Zehava Gal (Astasie) and the nimble Eberhard Lorenz (Calpigi, chief eunuch of the harem) -- simply shines. And until Tarare dons blackface and gets greasepaint all over his scene partners, the show is a delight to look at.

If the musical and dramatic variety of “Tarare” surprises people, it shouldn’t -- not after Cecilia Bartoli’s bestselling Decca CD “The Salieri Album,” released in 2003. Having made her name singing Rossini, Bartoli retains a reputation for pyrotechnics. Predictably, that was the feature many reviews of her Salieri anthology singled out. In fact, it made comparatively light demands on her vaunted speed, range and pinpoint precision. To a far greater extent, it called on her equally bewitching ability to etch personalities in music. Ranging from bejeweled heroic rhetoric to simplest pastorale, she revealed the composer’s expressive compass no less than her own.

“Virtuosity is just one means Salieri uses to give his characters dramatic truth, to delve into their hearts,” Bartoli says from Switzerland, where she has been appearing as Cleopatra in Handel’s “Julius Caesar.” “It may be tragic or comic, depending on the context, but it’s never an end in itself.”

Which is not to say that Salieri did not on occasion push virtuosity to the limit. “Europa Riconosciuta,” the opera revived at La Scala in December, was written for the inauguration of the house in 1778. Back then, a cast of five of the showiest vocalists of a showy age was assembled: two prima donnas, two castrati and a tenor. Salieri tailored the work to their astounding gifts.

For La Scala’s return to its original home after a three-year renovation, Muti chose to honor the history of the institution with the first revival of “Europa” since that triumphant first production. (As has been widely reported, Muti has since resigned.)

“Europa” concerns two princesses from Greek mythology, Europa and Semele, each with claims on the throne of Tyre. As conceived, the opera was meant to dazzle as much by spectacle as through music. The first thing the audience saw onstage was a shipwreck; later, one of the castrati entered on horseback, leading an entire cavalcade. The director Luca Ronconi and designer Pier Luigi Pizzi delivered these thrills as required but finessed the froufrou an 18th century audience would have demanded. Instead, by means of mirrors and sliding blocks and staircases, they found sleek contemporary equivalents for the theatrical machinery beloved of the Baroque. On the home screen, their solutions may look Spartan; in the theater, they were magical.

Muti remarked that the demands on the leading ladies -- Diana Damrau as Europa and Desiree Rancatore as Semele -- make a role such as Mozart’s Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” look like a walk in the park. As every opera lover knows, the Queen of the Night skips up to F above high C. Europa and Semele live there; the acrobatics they execute in the stratosphere go on for pages. Damrau sang three F-sharps, as indicated in the score, and threw in a G in a cadenza of her own.

“Every role has its difficulties,” the soprano says from London, where she is singing in the world premiere of Lorin Maazel’s “1984.” “The Queen of the Night is a very brilliant part, but it’s also very short. Europa is a title character. The whole story turns on her. She is a real woman, with many scenes to play and many facets to show: her love, her concern for her child, her willingness to surrender her power. Her music is sometimes very lyrical, sometimes very dramatic. It really is almost impossible to sing. The really important thing, though, isn’t the technical display. It’s to give expression to every tone.”

Damrau’s and Rancatore’s phenomenal performances grew more and more assured in the course of the opera’s run. But what seems to have surprised Muti even more than Salieri’s vocal filigree was the craftsmanship of his instrumental writing.

“Music is great when it is constructed like architecture,” the conductor says. “That happens here. In the prelude, Salieri conjures up the drama of the raging sea without anything you could call a musical theme. Like Beethoven, he could build large structures from a single cell. The details are in fantastic conflict, yet the whole has a fantastic harmony.”

In Muti’s hands, “Europa” emerged as a work touched with divine fire, but further revivals seem unlikely any time soon. Apart from its rather stiff plot, the casting challenges are practically insurmountable.

No such problems stand in the way of Salieri’s “Falstaff” (1799), a smooth and lively translation of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor” in the operatic conventions of the time.

In the view of Malgoire -- whose discography includes not only the DVD of “Tarare” but also an audio “Falstaff” on the Dynamic label -- “Falstaff” is the richer of the two. (At least two other versions have appeared on CD, and a fourth is available on another Arthaus Musik DVD.)

The work “is really a masterpiece of opera buffa,” Malgoire says from Paris. “That isn’t to say that it’s a completely comical work. As in the greatest Mozart, there’s a mixture of comedy and drama. The difference between opera buffa and opera seria -- literally, ‘comic opera’ and ‘serious opera’ -- is actually a matter of form rather than content. Opera seria is bound by many conventions that opera buffa exploded. Salieri’s ‘Falstaff’ is a tragic story in opera buffa form.”

Several other Salieri operas are on CD. Though not all are in print, in a world of Amazon and Google a patient searcher should be able to find them all.

To my mind, “Axur, Re d’Ormus” (1788) -- a makeover of “Tarare,” prepared for Vienna to a libretto adapted and translated by Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist for “Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte” -- pales beside “Tarare.” Author Rice, whose “Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998, blames the Nuova Era recording, which he describes as “pretty wretched.” The 1774 “La Locandiera” (also from Nuova Era), based on a play by the popular Carlo Goldoni, concerns the hostess of an inn whom no man can resist, but if you heard its agreeable tunes as you passed the opera house, you might well just walk on by.

But then there is “Les Danaides” (1784), a savage tragedy of brotherly hate, deception and mass murder such as only the ancient Greeks could have concocted (on EMI). Having accepted a commission to write it, Salieri’s ailing mentor, Gluck, secretly passed the libretto on to Salieri. At the premiere in Paris, it was palmed off as Gluck’s work for fear that the audience would reject it otherwise. Its success, though, was instantaneous, and Gluck did the right thing. The final scene, set in hell, finds the homicidal daughters of the wicked Danaus (these are the Danaids) writhing under the whips of the demons who will torture them through all eternity. Here, once again, is the fantastic harmony within fantastic conflict that Muti found in “Europa Riconosciuta.”

There’s so little out there

As for live performances, make of this what you will: A recent search for the period 2004 to mid-2007 at the useful website Operabase .com yielded two low-profile productions of “Falstaff” (a total of four performances), the Scala “Europa,” one festival recital and stagings of “La Grotta di Trofonio” (Trofonio’s Grotto, 1785) in the Swiss city of Lausanne and of “Il Ricco di un Giorno” (Rich for a Day, 1784) in Verona, Italy. Alas, the dates for all are past.

“Trofonio” and “Il Ricco” are operas excerpted on Bartoli’s CD, for which, she says, she studied practically the entire extant Salieri repertoire. That may well make her, along with Rice, one of the world’s two top experts. Given the chance to bring one of the operas to the stage, she would choose “Armida” (1783) or “La Scuola de’ Gelosi” (The School for Jealous Lovers, 1778).

Rice, for his part, would like to see “La Fiera di Venezia” (The Fair in Venice, 1772) and “Palmira, Regina di Persia” (Palmira, Queen of Persia, 1795), other operas of which Bartoli has given listeners a taste.

“ ‘La Fiera’ is a classic opera buffa,” Rice says, “one of Salieri’s most successful early operas. It takes place during the Ascension fair in Venice and requires a whole series of sets -- a wonderful challenge for a stage designer. The opera is full of amusing situations, and the second-act finale features a great ballroom scene that anticipates Mozart’s in ‘Don Giovanni.’

“ ‘Palmira’ is a heroic-comic opera very much in the spirit of ‘Axur.’ Once again, the scenic element is crucial. Three princes, rivals for Palmira’s hand, enter -- one riding a horse, one a camel and one an elephant. An impressive temple scene features one of the first a cappella quartets in the history of opera, ‘Silenzio facciasi,’ a short piece that was a great hit in its time.”

Will anyone be taking up either challenge soon?

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Rice says. “Like the vast majority of Salieri’s operas, neither of these has ever been published.”