Monday, May 09, 2005
Antonio Salieri: Once Ruled Europe's Music Houses, Now In Search of a Lost Reputation after being Unfairly Maligned by Mozart

The ANNOTICO Report

Milos Forman's film of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" (named best picture of
1984 by AMPAS, ranked 53rd on the American Film Institute's list of the 100
greatest American movies of all time), painted Salieri as villainous, blind
with rage at Mozart's celestial manuscripts, humiliated by his rival's
genius, tortured unto madness by his own mediocrity. And Shaffer was not
the first to suggest a deadly enmity between the composers.

Yet lost from view has been Salieri the respected professional: protégé of
the magisterial Gluck, teacher of the immortal Beethoven, Schubert and
Liszt. In addition to more than 40 Salieri 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.

A rediscovery of Salieri's talent is underway.

None less than Cecilia Bartoli's is one of Salieri's greatest boosters, and
her bestselling Decca CD "The Salieri Album," released in 2003, ranged from
bejeweled heroic rhetoric to simplest pastorale, and revealed the
composer's expressive compass no less than her own.

For the fabled Teatro alla Scala of Milan return to its original home after
a 3 year renovation, Riccardo Muti, the then Director/Conductor chose to
honor the history of the institution with the first revival of "Salieri's
"Europa Riconosciuta" (Europa's Identity Revealed), since that triumphant
first production that was written specifically for the inauguration of La
Scala 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.

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.

Muti remarked that the demands on the leading ladies — Diana Damrau as
Europa and Désirée 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.

Bartloi says, "The Queen of the Night is a very brilliant part, but it's
also very short. Whereas 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."

Muti says, "Music is great when it is constructed like architecture." "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."

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.

Salieri buffs favorites include Salieri's "Falstaff" (1799), a smooth and
lively translation of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" in the
operatic conventions of the time. " The 1774 "La Locandiera", "Les
Danaïdes" (1784), "La Grotta di Trofonio" (Trofonio's Grotto, 1785), "Il
Ricco di un Giorno" (Rich for a Day, 1784), "Armida" (1783), "La Scuola
de' Gelosi" (The School for Jealous Lovers, 1778), "La Fiera di Venezia"
(The Fair in Venice, 1772) and "Palmira, Regina di Persia" (Palmira, Queen
of Persia, 1795).

Classical Music

IN SEARCH OF A LOST REPUTATION

Composer Antonio Salieri once ruled Europe's music houses.
Find the rare productions of his works and it's easy to see why.

Los Angeles Times
By Matthew Gurewitsch
Special to The Times
May 8, 2005

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 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: protégé 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

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.

"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."

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 "Così 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 Danaïdes" (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."

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