This classical music video is called Mozart vs Salieri. It is from the film Amadeus. It agrees with the widespread idea that Salieri hated Mozart. But is that idea true?
Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands today:
Work by Mozart and Salieri heard for the first time
Today, 16:40
In the Czech capital Prague for the first time a joint composition by Mozart and Salieri has been performed. It was played on the harpsichord in the Czech Music Museum.
The piece from 1785 was discovered recently. According to experts the cooperation proves that Salieri did not hate Mozart, as is claimed in the Oscar-winning film Amadeus.
Research
The cantata “Per la salute di ricuperata Ofelia” was found in the archives of the National Museum in Prague. The work had become lost over 200 years ago.
In the catalog of Mozart’s work, Köchel Catalogue, there was the name KV 477a. That work was gone.
Thanks to research by the German musicologist and composer Timo Jouko Herrmann it surfaced in November, along with the text.
Voice lost
Mozart and Salieri wrote the piece as a welcome gift for a singer who had lost her voice, but who had recovered. In the film Amadeus (1984), the two also work together. Only Salieri is so jealous of the talented and dissolute Mozart that he destroys the young composer. In reality, they competed with each other in Vienna, but they worked well together, say experts.
This video says about itself:
Long-Lost Mozart Score Performed For First Time By Czech Musician
16 February 2016
After a musicologist discovered the piece in the reserve collection of the Czech national music museum, a long-lost composition by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri was performed for the first time on Tuesday.
The piece also appears to show the rivalry between the two was not especially fierce. It provides more evidence that Salieri played no role in Mozart’s death in 1791 at the age of 35. The play and Oscar-winning film “Amadeus” detailed such a murderous rivalry.
The collaborative score was written in 1785. That was during one of the most fruitful periods of Mozart’s career. He composed some of his best-known pieces then, including the operas “Don Giovanni” and “The Magic Flute.”
Ulrich Leisinger, director of research at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg, said, “Salieri did not poison Mozart, but they both worked in Vienna and were competitors.”
Museum officials said, the piece, titled “Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), was written to celebrate the recovery of an English singer who had performed pieces by Mozart and Salieri. They said it is unclear whether it was ever performed in public before today.
See also here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
That is an important information. I sang a lot of Mozart’s compositions and loved the movie. It feels good to know that they were not enemies.
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Thank you, Erika!
Maybe you will sing this newly discovered one 🙂
The idea that Salieri hated Mozart is from Pushkin’s 1832 play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_Salieri_%28play%29
If you write a play, then the play gets more interesting if the protagonists hate each other than if the protagonists don’t really have a conflict 🙂
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That is very true. Even back then they believed what was said on “TV”… Thank you for all the facts. You are a living encyclopedia!
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🙂
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