Salieri's Revenge. The New Yorker, June 3, 2019.
I first had the idea for writing an article about Salieri back in 2012, when, while researching my lecture on "Black Wagnerism," I came across the libretto of Salieri's final opera, Die Neger. When I discovered that that opera includes an interracial love story, one that ends happily with an onstage kiss, I began to think twice about Salieri's place in music history. I am grateful to Timo Jouko Herrmann, John Rice, Christophe Rousset, and Andrea Harrandt of the Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek for their assistance during the peculiarly long gestation time for the resulting piece.
Rousset's recording of Tarare, Salieri's collaboration with Beaumarchais, is being issued next week by Aparte. Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques have previously recorded Salieri's operas La grotta di Trofonio, Les Horaces, and Les Danaïdes. Some other notable recordings: Il mondo alla rovescia, from the Arena di Verona (Dynamic); Andreas Staier's disc of the two piano concertos, with Concerto Köln (Teldec); Cecilia Bartoli's album of Salieri arias (Decca); Diana Damrau's disc of Salieri, Mozart, and Reghini arias (Virgin); Riccardo Muti's video of Europa riconosciuta from La Scala (Erato); Falstaff with the Madrigalists of Milan (Chandos); L'Arte del Mondo's La scuola de' gelosi (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi); the Requiem in C Minor, with Lawrence Foster and the Gulbenkian Foundation (Pentatone); and the Mannheim Mozart Orchestra's two bracing volumes of overtures (Hänssler).
A brief bibliography:
Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Morio Verlag, 2019)
Herrmann, Antonio Salieri und seine deutschsprachigen Werke für das Musiktheater (Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag, 2015)
Mozart, Salieri, Cornetti, Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, ed. Herrmann (Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag, 2016)
John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Volkmar Braunbehrens, Maligned Master: The Real Story of Antonio Salieri (Fromm, 1992)
Ian Woodfield, Cabals and Satires: Mozart's Comic Operas in Vienna (Oxford UP, 2018)
David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-
Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 (Oxford UP, 2012)
Jessica M. Abbazio, Antonio Salieri’s "La calamita de’ cuori" (1774): Sources, Form, Context (PhD. diss., University of Maryland, 2016)
Thomas Betzwieser and Arthur Groos, "Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais' and Salieri's 'Le Couronnement de Tarare' (1790)," Cambridge Opera Journal 6:2 (July 1994), pp. 91–112.
Christopher H. Gibbs, "Writing Under the Influence?: Salieri and Schubert's Early Opinion of Beethoven," Current Musicology 75 (2003
John Spitzer, "Musical Attribution and Critical Judgment: The Rise and Fall of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b,"
