| Italian composer, highly admired
in his time and remembered for his rivalry with
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Born in Legnago, he studied with the Austrian composers Florian Gassmann
(1729–74) and Christoph Willibald Gluck and became court composer in
Vienna. His works are primarily operas, church music, and cantatas; his
students included the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the Austrian composer
Franz Schubert. Salieri intrigued against Mozart, whom he saw as a formidable
rival. The unproven legend that he murdered Mozart was the subject of an
opera, Mozart et Salieri (1898), by the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov,
set to the drama by the Russian poet
Aleksandr Pushkin; it was also the
subject of the play Amadeus (1979; film, 1984) by the British playwright
Peter Shaffer |