In 1863-64, the author penned what remains today the most extensive biography of Antonio Salieri in the English language. In a lively style, abounding with wit and commentary on current events, the author presents a thorough account of Salieri's life, dealing objectively with such controversial issues as his supposed "boycott" of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, his obstruction of Mozart's desired appointment at court, his alleged poisoning of Mozart, and the delusions which Salieri suffered during his mental and physical decline in old age. Viewed against the backdrop of long-time Hapsburg patronage of Italian opera in Vienna, Salieri emerges as an industrious composer of musical comedy and drama to suit the imperial taste. For the first time he becomes a recognizable human being, a loving husband and father, a light-hearted friend, as well as a generous teacher. At the same time, however, Salieri remained politically astute, even cunning, in furthering his own career. Thayer's compelling narrative includes liberal quotes from associates who knew Salieri well, in addition to many personal reminiscences by the composer himself. This new, updated and enlarged edition also contains several appendices which Thayer was forced to omit from the original, including Salieri's essays on his teacher Gluck and on methods of string playing, as well as observations on the aged Salieri's behavior by his two male nurses.

Publisher Description

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a genius, the most brilliant musician the world will ever see. But the court of eighteenth-century Vienna doesn t recognize his talents - only Antonio Salieri, the Court Composer, does, and he is tortured by what he hears. Seething with rage at the genius of this flippant buffoon and suddenly aware of his own mediocrity, Salieri declares war and sets out to destroy the man he sees as God s instrument on earth. Peter Shaffer s award-winning play is a rich, exuberant portrayal of a God-like man among mortals, and lives destroyed by envy."

Mozart and Salieri, probably the best known of Pushkin's `Little Tragedies', was written in 1830 during the peak of the poet's creative powers. Like the other Little Tragedies it is a `closet drama' which concentrates on the devastating effects of an all-consuming human passion, in this case envy. Mozart and Salieri typifies Pushkin's implicational technique of character construction: the salient points of a fictional psyche are highlighted sufficiently to suggest inner depth while stopping short of precise concretication; this allows full play to lectorial inference on a plurality of connotational levels - thematic, psychological and sociological. The present work, the first of its kind in English, isolates two major thematic dominants in the play - envy and music - and these form the focus for its aesthetic and psychological preoccupations respectively. A variety of psychological approaches are brought to bear on the play's protagonists including adaptations of the theories of Freud, Adler, Jung and Klages. The readiness with which these contrastive but complementary approaches yield new insights into the nature and motivations of the protagonists of Mozart and Salieri points to a work of profound cultural significance, something all the more remarkable given its modest compass. The sociological and anthropological approaches applied to the drama in this study dwell particularly on theories of social interaction and theories of alienation, anomie and suicide. Pushkin has often been regarded as an enigmatic phenomenon in the west, the compactness and economy of his works often seeming at odds with the degree of impact which they have made on subsequent generations of Russian writers. The present work seeks to lay bare what is typical for Pushkin: the intimation of great psychological and philosophical truths via a superficially unassuming medium. It is not surprising, therefore, that the influence of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, and of the aesthetic and ideological positions they represent, can be felt in the works of later Russian writers, notably Dostoyevsky.