Antonio Salieri’s Revenge | Hacker News Reader

Antonio Salieri’s Revenge

newyorker.com

62 pointspseudolus20 comments

> That arrangement lands particularly hard on contemporary composers, who must compete with a group of semi-mythical figures who are worshipped as house gods.

Likewise, it's probably true that the popular history of modern science focuses on too small group of well-known 20th-century scientists. But if you're going to lay out that argument you probably should not choose John von Neumann as your example case.

Same with W.A. Mozart. He's the semi-mythical gods' semi-mythical god. Where another composer might write a menuet Mozart might have three dances with conflicting time signatures sounding at the same time (yet agreeing in their harmonies). And that's just in passing-- it's not even a climactic moment of the opera (which itself manages to exceeds that moment in historical importance).

Or he might throw a wildcard variation into a theme and variations and end up writing a folk-like melody so convincing that it's extracted for a 21st-century commercial to sell Irish whiskey.[1]

The impact of Mozart is that you can strip away all the pretension and hero-worship from the classical world and his music would probably still take up its current proportion of worldwide performance time. It turns out his music really is that striking and stands out when people listen closely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2kxy--UiM

> That arrangement lands particularly hard on contemporary composers, who must compete with a group of semi-mythical figures who are worshipped as house gods.

Hardly a new phenomenon. Brahms could be arguably said to belong to that Pantheon, but he struggled hard with the old composers reputation. Of particular note its first symphony [0]

But also one can do a search for his quotes relating to Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_(Brahms)

Right.

What I'm saying is that any composer who would have struggled with Mozart's reputation would have very quickly hit up against a bigger problem: that nearly no other human beings have the capacity to remember, synthesize, and internalize the amount of music necessary to compose the way he did.

That's why while Mozart was "grandfathered" into the Romantic period by early Romantic composers and writers, everyone emulated Beethoven in practice. At least obsessive motivic transformation is a tractable problem. (One which, btw, is a subset of Mozart's output.)

Bach is in that same ballpark, though I'd argue that Mozart's output also includes examples of clear mastery of Bach's contrapuntal techniques.

It's tragic that a man's reputation can be sullied for centuries after his death merely as the result of the overactive imaginations of court gossips. Then again, were it not for his reputation as the murderer of Mozart, who would remember him?

Doubtless there were dozens of not hundreds of composers throughout Europe in that timeframe. Surely there were some forgotten or in obscurity who still had music worth listening to? At least Salieri’s name and work lives on, even in another’s shadow.

I was a classical violist, and we don't have a lot of repertoire, so we often rob minor works from other instruments to enrich our stockpiles. I'm amazed at how little of that material is any good. The taste of generations of musicians and audiences has done an amazing job of gathering the wheat and releasing the chaff; there's not much among the productions of minor composers that can stand with Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and the like. Every time I find a new work by Draeseke, Zelter, Sirmen, Juon, or some other mediocrity, I hope this will finally be the one jewel — but it never is.

Fair enough, guess the original patrons knew best. How does Salieri compare to either tier?

Upper-middle of the lower tier, in my opinion. But it's just an opinion.

After reading a biography of Salieri, and hearing some of his opinions on the "right way" to write opera, I was interested to hear some of his music, and so bought a couple of albums, mostly of his overtures. I really enjoyed them -- definitely worth looking in to, particularly if you enjoy the Classical period.

There is definitely a lot of forgettable fluff in the history of music. On the other hand, there are many great composers that deserve to be better known -- not particularly obscure, but at the same time without the kind of name recognition of the top tier, except to serious fans of classical music. C. F. Abel, Biber, Albicastro, Molter, Sances, Marais, Blavet, Leclair, Heinichen, Forqueray, Carbonelli, Carissimi, Cavalli, Bonporti, Busoni, Zelenka, Agricola, the Caccinis, Couperin, Gesualdo... Very hard to find concert programs featuring many of these!

I think Couperin stands out on your list. He’s better known and more popular than the rest.

That may depend on your experience; some of his list are very well known to vocalists, others to violinists, others to keyboard players, and so on.

I was speaking from the point of view of non-musician/non-specialist. In my subjective opinion, Couperin would definitely make the top 100 of best classical composers, while I'm not so sure about the rest. Sure, he's no Bach, but he's still one of the top composers of baroque period: https://www.baroque.org/baroque/composers

I’ve performed Jean-Marie Leclair in recital — the violin sonata, op. 9 no. 3 in D major (see https://imslp.org/wiki/12_Violin_Sonatas%2C_Op.9_(Leclair%2C... ). There are beautiful recordings of this piece by Szeryng and Oistrakh.

All this is true, even though I'd still hold that they don't have works that stand with the best of the recognized greats' works.

But again, some of these composers have works that are firmly in the general repertoire — Biber's Mystery Sonatas, Marais' amazing suites, the Leclair 2-violin sonatas — and others are real mainstays of early-music performances. I'd say they have the approval of that long-term taste filter that we were talking about. (I'd quibble about the long-term staying power of Busoni, but the point still stands.)

Gesualdo has a pretty solid reputation as a composer. His lack of recognition is probably due to madrigals going out of fashion.

Then again, part of the reputation of composers like Bach or Mozart lies in that they were able to create music of any kind their era had imagined.

IIRC both Mozart and Schubert have fallen in and out of the repertoire and had to be "rediscovered" by musicologists in the 20th century as people didn't "get" their music - at one point people thought Mozart was only good for writing light music.

(no source to hand...)

Here is something about the Amadeus play and movie that this author, like so many others, does not seem to get: the entire plot is based on the illusions of a madman. Did the author missed the part at the beginning where the character Salieri slashes his own throat and is then put in a madhouse? Every account about Mozart and everyone else in the movie/play is the version of some nut who is clearly out of his mind. "Amadeus" was never meant to be a historical biography.

> I struck off into another street for fear of hearing something still worse.

Antonio was smart enough to stay away from social media!

That also sounds like half the reason he's not a big name today: he was more interested in writing and teaching music than self-promotion.

Salieri.

It reminds me this quote: "Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay’s code, it seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I understand the greatness. I don’t understand how it’s done."

in the excellent article "The Friendship That Made Google Huge" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

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