Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), Italian composer, highly admired in his time. Although Salieri is remembered chiefly for his rivalry with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there is little evidence of any animosity between the two composers. Born in Legnago, he studied with the Austrian composers Florian Gassmann and Christoph Willibald Gluck and became a court composer in Vienna. His works are primarily operas, church music, and cantatas; his students included the Hungarian Franz Liszt and the Austrian Franz Schubert. An undocumented legend that he murdered Mozart was the subject of an opera by the Russian Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, set to a drama by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin; it was also the subject of both the play and film version Amadeus, written by British playwright Peter Shaffer.