Hacker News Reader

Comment by yaakov34 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a more slandered person in all of history than Salieri? This is the man who murdered the world's greatest musical genius in his prime out of jealousy ... except that he fucking didn't, and the notion is ridiculous. The man whose music wasn't performed in many countries as a result of this belief. The man whose name became synonymous with talentless mediocrity - just because we don't listen to opera from his period as much as we listen to some other stuff.

View on HN

>Is there a more slandered person in all of history than Salieri?

Richard III of England comes to mind, but of course Salieri has been treated badly, not in the least by the well-known movie.

I'm taking a guess that you probably weren't a personal witness to the interactions between Salieri and Mozart and thus can't say for sure if he was involved with Mozart's death.

What is a historical fact is that Salieri openly and explicitly prevented Mozart's career from going where Mozart wanted it to go. Mozart's talent won in the end, but Salieri did go to great lengths to try and keep Mozart from thriving. He was well-known to have placed many walls in the path of work for Mozart, and this led to the reputation he has -- a product of his own making.

Whether or not he actually killed Mozart we can never truly know. But that there is this "rumor" that he might have is only due to Salieri's own awful behavior in the treatment of Mozart.

>What is a historical fact is that Salieri openly and explicitly prevented Mozart's career from going where Mozart wanted it to go.

Quotes from credible modern historians please. To my knowledge most historians think that there is no concrete evidence of this. There was just competition for jobs. Rest is drama added later.

>Whether or not he actually killed Mozart we can never truly know.

Good example of the false rumor. Salieri seems to even have confessed the murder when he was delirious but nobody believed him even then. Later he took that confession back.

Salieri's confession itself was never anything more than a rumor. Following his delirium and suicide attempt, it was said that he confessed to a priest that he poisoned Mozart, but there is no such written note or testimony (I suppose there couldn't be, since priests don't reveal confessions). Again, we can't prove with mathematical certainty that he didn't confess, but given that he had many mutual friends with Mozart and that they defended him from these accusations throughout this period, we have no reason to believe such a thing.

If you consider Mozart's own letters to be credible historical sources, he wrote about Salieri's attempts to sabotage his career.

There is correspondence between Mozart and his father about a cabal of Italians (especially the court composer Salieri) hindering him. I would say this reflects worse on the Mozarts than it does on Salieri, who spent almost his whole life in Vienna and didn't belong to any Italian cabals. In any case, Mozart established himself rapidly in Vienna and his complaints about Salieri, with whom he had friendly relations, trailed off.

This kind of thing is now a reason to accuse someone of the lowest kind of murder out of jealousy?

A great illustration of how the slander works: "we can never know". Of course we do know, to the normal standard of historical proof, that Salieri didn't kill Mozart: any sane historian would note the fact that Mozart died after a fairly prolonged illness, that his death wasn't considered suspicious at the time by his doctor or his family, and that rumors of Salieri's involvement started decades later, and that the supposed "Salieri's confession" doesn't exist, and would pronounce the case closed. It's not a mathematical proof, but that can't be the standard by which we dismiss baseless rumors, unless we want to keep around every ridiculous accusation ever made by people who were not even contemporaries to the events.

As for the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart, it seems that there was a short period of rivalry while Mozart was trying to establish himself in Vienna, and a longer period of amiable relations and collaboration (such as the music piece now discovered). None of this rose above the expected level (given that they had different musical styles), and it certainly doesn't make a composer who was otherwise not known to be involved in murders into a poisoner.

> The man whose music wasn't performed in many countries as a result of this belief.

What are you talking about? Salieri was actually REDISCOVERED precisely because of the movie. Before the movie his legacy had gone in complete obscurity.

History didn't start with that movie, you know. Salieri's work was not performed e.g. in Russia, where the influence of Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" was particularly strong, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. For part of the 20th century, I was a witness to that myself - I heard several times from friends who were musicians that Salieri's works are never performed because he is thought to have poisoned Mozart. This is why his music was obscure. If he is being rediscovered after yet more slander, well, that's good, but two centuries of the worst kind of lies and calumnies are still a bad way to treat a person, I would say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com