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IN DETERMINING THE INFLUENCE OF ONE MUSICAL GENERATION UPON ANOTHER, inquisitive musicologists often find themselves asking the classic queries so often encountered in elementary journalism class: who, what, where, when, why, and how?
In the case of Beethoven's studies in Vienna, these questions-especially when-yield a variety of simple and complex answers. Beethoven went to Vienna in November 1792 for the express purpose of studying with Joseph Haydn and, over die next decade, also studied, sometimes regularly and sometimes occasionally, with cathedral Kapellmeister Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), theatrical composer Johann Baptist Schenk (1753-1836), free-lance composer Emanuel Aloys Förster (1748-1823), and, of course, the Academy-Award-winning court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri.
Salieri was born in Legnago in the Veneto on August 18, 1750. Orphaned at age fifteen, he was sent to study in Venice, where he was discovered by the visiting Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, in turn, virtually adopted the talented youngster and took him back with him to Vienna.1 Once in the Habsburg capital, Salieri-encouraged by both Gassmann and Christoph Willibald Gluck-ingratiated himself with Emperor Joseph II and eventually united in himself virtually all of the major compositional, conducting, and administrative positions at court. At the same time, his operas were performed throughout Europe, and he himself journeyed to Milan and Paris for several premieres. When Joseph died in 1790, his successor Leopold II had little taste for Salieri, his style, and his mistress Catarina Cavalieri, and relieved him of most of his collective posts except, strangely enough, the conductorship of the Hofkapelle. Having married into the wealth of the minor nobility and having received excellent terms for his operatic commissions, Salieri could still live quite comfortably, gpvinggratis or inexpensive lessons in composition or singing to the next generation of Viennese composers and performers.
Salieri suffered a major physical and mental decline in October 1823 and had to be taken to the state of the art Allgemeines Krankenhaus (General Hospital), but not to its Narrenturm (a round building devoted to the mentally ill). He attempted to cut his throat once, possibly even twice, and in his senile delirium, early in 1824, fantasized that he had poisoned Mozart. He must have spent much of his final year in an almost continuous state of silence and died quietly on...