Salieri, Antonio (1750-1825), 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 and Christoph Willibald Gluck and became a court composer in Vienna. His works are primarily operas, church music, and cantatas; his students included the Hungarian Franz Liszt and the Austrian 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 by the Russian Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, set to a drama by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin; it was also the subject of both the play and film version Amadeus, written by British playwright Peter Shaffer.
Copyright © 2001 Jila. All rights reserved.
