Mozart, Salieri, Haydn and Beethoven in Vienna

These are some programme notes i have just been working on for your interest:

Mozart, Salieri, Haydn and Beethoven in Vienna

Vienna in the 18th Century had a musical life that was important enough to attract all the major European composers and performers.  

In 1766 it brought Antonio Salieri to take up a court post, eventually achieving the most important of all Viennese posts, ‘Court Composer’ to Emperor Joseph II in 1774.  

By the 1780s Mozart was also living and working in Vienna.  He and his father Leopold wrote in their letters that several "cabals" of Italians, led by Salieri, were actively creating obstacles in the way of Mozart obtaining certain posts or of staging his operas.

'Salieri and his tribe will move heaven and earth to put it down', Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter Nannerl at the time of the premiere of Figaro in 1785.  However, it is unlikely that Salieri was involved, at this time he was very busy with his new opera with Lorenzo da Ponte, Axur, re d'Ormus.

There is far more evidence of a cooperative relationship between the two composers.  For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own; and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three of Mozart's masses in his luggage.  Salieri and Mozart even composed a cantata for voice and piano together called Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia (sadly this work is lost). 

In his last surviving letter from 14th October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he collected Salieri in his carriage and drove him to the performance of his new opera The Magic Flute, speaking enthusiastically: "He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last chorus there was no piece that didn't elicit a "Bravo!" or "Bello!" out of him”

 Salieri was a famous teacher and his list of pupils included Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, Hummel, Süssmayr, Meyerbeer and Mozart’s son, Franz Xavier Mozart.  He was also a famous teacher of singing and all his students loved and respected him.  Friends remembered him as generous, warm and kind-hearted, and he even had the ability to laugh at himself (at least at his difficulties with the German language).  He must have had a way with people, since he apparently established a close personal relationship with the difficult Beethoven.

The close friendship between Mozart and Haydn is well documented and his masterpiece ‘The Creation’ (1796-98) owes much of it’s inspiration to Mozart’s The Magic Flute.  Mozart always said that he had learned how to write string quartets from Haydn and dedicated his six final quartets to the older man.  They must have met in Vienna in the early 1780's, perhaps at Christmas 1783, when they both participated in a concert.  

Haydn freely praised Mozart, without jealousy, to his friends.  For instance, he wrote to Franz Rott.

'If only I could impress Mozart's inimitable works on the soul of every friend of music, and the souls of high personages in particular, as deeply, with the same musical understanding and with the same deep feeling, as I understand and feel them, the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel.

Perhaps the most impressive figure in Vienna at the beginning of the 19th Century was that of Ludwig van Beethoven.  He had first come to Vienna, from his native Bonn, in 1787 specifically to meet Mozart and had improvised at the piano for him.  Mozart famously announced to his guests that the young Beethoven would become famous.  Sadly Beethoven had to return to Bonn to tend to his dying mother and by the time he returned to Vienna, Mozart had already died. 

It would be a very long essay indeed that would attempt to assess the impact that Mozart’s work had on Beethoven.  The young Beethoven idolised Mozart.  The last three Symphonies of Mozart, of which the ‘Jupiter’ (1791) is the final, had a profound impact on all the music that followed them and helped to shape the Symphonic form that Beethoven would leave as a legacy to the great romantic composers of the late 19th and early 20th century.

With Mozart dead, Beethoven took lessons from Haydn from 1792 to 1794, broken off only by Haydn’s last trip to London.

During the course of the two years, however, the relationship between the two men soured.  According to contemporary accounts, the issue surfaced most notably upon the publication of Beethoven's first compositions.  Wishing to assist the young composer, Haydn suggested that Beethoven include the phrase 'pupil of Haydn' underneath his name in order to garner advantage from Haydn's considerable fame.   At this suggestion Beethoven bristled.  According to the account left by Ferdinand Ries, "Beethoven was unwilling to because, as he said, although he had some instruction from Haydn he had never learned anything from him."   

After the first performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony ‘Eroica’, Haydn famously declared that music would 'never be the same again'.  Despite this, however, Beethoven and Haydn remained on generally good terms until Haydn's death in 1809, the year of Beethoven’s great final Piano Concerto ‘The Emperor’.

With Haydn in London, Beethoven studied with Salieri from 1800 to 1802. Salieri taught him how to write for singers, essentially for the opera.  However, Beethoven never felt able to take up Mozart’s operatic mantle and only completed one ‘Fidelio’.   Despite being surpassed by his pupil, Salieri continued to take an interest in Beethoven’s work, playing in the premiere performance of the 7th Symphony and attending most of the premieres of the others.

Salieri, having almost survived his three great rivals, met his end in an Asylum and went to the grave protesting his innocence of Mozart’s death.  It is perhaps ironic and yet fitting that on the death of Haydn in 1809, Beethoven in 1827 and Salieri in 1825 memorial concerts were held in Vienna and one work was played at all of them and it was Mozart’s, his Requiem.