A long-lost work by supposed rivals and sometime collaborators Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri has been found in the Czech National Museum’s reserve collection, and will be introduced at a press conference Tuesday.
Prague’s a favorite destination for tourists and artists, as it was in the 18th century when the two musicians worked on the piece, along with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the words for a number of Mozart’s operas. Mozart spent a significant amount of time in Prague.
The film Amadeus, source of the picture above, was filmed in Prague in 1984, and portrays the two as increasingly bitter rivals; the film suggests that Salieri, out of jealousy, poisoned Mozart. In reality, that story didn’t appear until a 19th century work by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
The Tuesday press conference will feature a performance of the piece.
Fascinating. Thanks for posting. My family and I have watched the film Amadeus at least two dozen times, and always supposed the Salieri poisoning was dramatic confabulation.
It had always seemed suspicious to me, but I had never known that it was Pushkin who earned a Parson Weems award for this one! Well, it certainly worked out well for F. Murray Abraham!