Rediscovering Salieri.(Antonio Salieri)

Discovering a composer, becoming familiar with his music and then making the choice of what to perform is a process that always fills me with excitement. This is especially true when it concerns composers who are rarely or not at all performed nowadays.

Today, we perform only a small part of the works composed in past centuries, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In that era, the idea of repertory had not yet become established, and the life of opera houses was always frantically paced by alternating new productions. The style of composing, of singing, and the very taste of the audience were always evolving, and new composers rose to prominence to replace those of past generations.

It shouldn't surprise us that many of the works of that period lie forgotten in libraries. But the fact that they are no longer performed doesn't mean that they are not works of quality--it only tells us that at a certain point, due to the evolution of the times, they were replaced by other works and eventually forgotten. (A perfect example is the case of Vivaldi, rediscovered in the early 1930s.)

In a time such as ours, when most of the classical music that is performed was composed a long time ago, often even a few centuries ago, I think it makes sense for an artist to perform, along with the established works that all of us know and love, the less familiar music we have found through our own research.

Musicological research holds unexpected surprises that renew our enthusiasm and push us to go on. But at the same time, this research can be lengthy and complicated. "Unknown" music is not always of equal value. We shouldn't be dazzled simply by the charm of "rediscovery": on the contrary, the works that we decide to bring back to life through performance must have intrinsic value and speak to our contemporary human sensibility.

Without doubt, Antonio Salieri's music possesses these qualities. It can be tragic or comic, full of fire or melancholy, but it is always extremely communicative and throbbing with life. It sweeps you up with its strength of emotion, especially when it comes to rendering the psychology of the characters and their interior life in a natural way. But it does so with a style all its own, having its foundation in the Italian tradition, and with Gluck as a model, it leads us to the threshold of Romanticism.

In getting to know Salieri's music, we gain a better understanding of one of the richest seminal periods in opera history. He is the hub around which the musical life of Vienna revolved for years--and oh, what years! His fame and compositions spread throughout Europe, especially to Italy--Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan, where his opera L'Europa Riconosciuta (1778) opened the new La Scala opera house--and France, where he scored great Parisian successes in Les Danaides (1784) and Tarare (1787, with a libretto by none other than Beaumarchais).