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 (he wrote more than 40), church music, and cantatas and he was extremely successful in his lifetime; 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, based on a play by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin; it was also the subject of both the play and film Amadeus, by British playwright Peter Shaffer.