Salieri, Antonio

Antonio Salieri – Les Danaïdes

(b. Legnago, Venetian Republic 18 August 1750 – d. Vienna, 7 May 1825)

Overture

Preface (by Alexander Carpenter, 2018)
Antonio Salieri was an Italian-born composer who spent most of his professional life in Vienna. He is remembered primarily as a composer of dramatic music—and in particular for the operas he composed for Vienna and Paris—but was also, and not incidentally, an influential teacher: his pupils comprise a “who’s who” of early 19th century music, including Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt and Meyerbeer. Salieri also taught Mozart’s son Franz, casting some doubt on the myth that Salieri not only actively undermined Mozart’s career, but that he also poisoned his putative rival. He served the imperial court for fifty years—virtually his entire career—as a composer of chamber music, opera, and sacred music. Salieri retired from his position at the imperial court in 1824, and died the following year.

As a composer of opera, Salieri developed a compositional style that challenged conventions and sought to merge the opera reforms of Christoph Willibald Gluck with elements of Italian and German dramatic music. Salieri came to prominence in Vienna under the patronage of the enlightened Habsburg emperor Joseph II in the early 1770s, composing Singspiel, opera buffa and opera seria. Salieri was Joseph II’s chamber music composer and also the director of the Italian opera in Vienna, but his work—in particular, his comic operas—enjoyed uneven success leading up to the early 1780s (no doubt, Emperor Joseph’s reorganization of the court theatres in the late 1770s, shifting emphasis towards German spoken drama, would have had a deleterious effect on Salieri’s opera career). Subsequent circumstances would further conspire against Salieri: he became unable to compose operas for Paris in the late 1780s because of the tumult of the French revolution; and his patron Joseph died in 1790. Salieri did retain his post as Hofkappellmeister of the imperial court following the ascension of Emperor Leopold II, and he continued to compose sacred music; however, his output as an opera composer declined sharply, and his final opera, staged in Vienna in 1804, was a failure.

Les Danaïdes is another story. This opera, which premiered in Paris in 1784, was a great success and is reputed to have been the work that helped establish Salieri’s international fame and reputation. Les Danaïdes is a five-act tragédie lyrique, with a text adapted from a libretto by Calzabigi on the subject of the Greek revenge-tragedy of King Danaus of Argos and his fifty daughters, the Danaïdes. Gluck received the original commission for Les Danaïdes in 1782, but was unable to fulfil the commission due to illness and passed the libretto on to Salieri. Although Salieri had not yet written a French opera, he was well-positioned to take over from Gluck as he had already taken a serious interest in opera reform in the early 1770s, incorporating Gluckian elements into his work…

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