Antonio Salieri - Biography

Biography

Salieri began his musical studies in his native town of Legnago; he was first taught at home by his older brother Francesco Salieri (a former student of the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini), and he received further lessons from the organist of the Legnago Cathedral, Giuseppe Simoni, a pupil of Padre Giovanni Battista Martini. Salieri would recall little from his childhood in later years except a passion for sugar, reading and music. He twice ran away from home without permission to hear his elder brother play violin concertos in neighboring churches on festival days (resulting in the loss of his beloved sugar), and he also recounted being chastised by his father after failing to greet a local priest with proper respect. Salieri responded to the reprimand by saying that the priest's organ playing displeased him because it was in an inappropriately theatrical style. Sometime between 1763 and 1764 Salieri suffered the death of both parents and was briefly taken in by an anonymous brother, a monk in Padua, and then for unknown reasons in 1765 or 1766 he became the ward of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo (which Giovanni is at this time unknown), a member of the powerful and well connected Mocenigo family. It is possible that Antonio's father and Giovanni were friends or business associates, but this is obscure. While living in Venice Salieri continued his musical studies with the organist and opera composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti, then following Pescetti's sudden death he studied with the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini or Pasini. It was through Pacini that Salieri gained the attention of the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, impressed with his talents and concerned for his future, took the young orphan to Vienna where he personally directed and paid for the remainder of his musical education.

Salieri and Gassmann arrived in Vienna on 15 June 1766. Gassmann's first act was to take Salieri to the Italian Church to consecrate his teaching and service to God, an event that left a deep impression on Salieri for the rest of his life. Salieri's education included instruction in Latin and Italian poetry by Fr. Don Pietro Tommasi, instruction in the German language, and European literature. His music studies revolved around vocal composition, and thoroughbass. His musical theory training in harmony and counterpoint was rooted in Johann Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, which Salieri translated during each Latin lesson. As a result Salieri continued to live with Gassmann even after Gassmann's marriage, an arrangement that lasted until the year of Gassmann's death and Salieri's own marriage in 1774. Few of Salieri's compositions have survived from this early period. In his old age Salieri hinted that these works were either purposely destroyed, or had been lost with the exception of a few works for the church. Among these sacred works there survives a Mass in C major written without a "Gloria" and in the antique a cappella style (presumably for one of the church's penitential seasons) and dated 2 August 1767. A complete opera composed in 1769 (presumably as a culminating study) La vestale (The Vestal Virgin) has also been lost.

Beginning in 1766 Gassmann introduced Salieri to the daily chamber music performances held during Emperor Joseph II's evening meal. Salieri quickly impressed the Emperor, and Gassmann was instructed to bring his pupil as often as he wished. This was the beginning of a relationship between monarch and musician that would last until Joseph's death in 1790. Salieri met Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi better known as Metastasio and Christoph Willibald Gluck during this period at the famous Sunday morning salons held at the home of the Martinez family. Here Metastasio had an apartment and participated in the weekly gatherings. Over the next several years Metastasio gave Salieri informal instruction in prosody and the declamation of Italian poetry, and Gluck became an informal advisor, friend and confidante. It was toward the end of this extended period of study that Gassmann was called away on a new opera commission and a gap in the theater's program allowed for Salieri to make his debut as a composer of a completely original opera buffa. Salieri's first full opera was composed during the winter and carnival season of 1770; Le donne letterate and was based on Molière's Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies) with a libretto by Giovanni Gastone Boccherini a dancer in the court ballet, and a brother of the famous composer. The modest success of this opera would launch Salieri's 34 year operatic career as a composer of over 35 original dramas.