As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protégé of Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages.

It was through Pacini that Salieri gained the attention of the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, impressed with his talents and concerned for his future, took the young orphan to Vienna where he personally directed and paid for the remainder of his musical education.

As a result Salieri continued to live with Gassmann even after Gassmann's marriage, an arrangement that lasted until the year of Gassmann's death and Salieri's own marriage in 1774.

Beginning in 1766 Gassmann introduced Salieri to the daily chamber music performances held during Emperor Joseph II's evening meal.

Salieri quickly impressed the Emperor, and Gassmann was instructed to bring his pupil as often as he wished.

It was toward the end of this extended period of study that Gassmann was called away on a new opera commission and a gap in the theater's program allowed for Salieri to make his debut as a composer of a completely original opera buffa.

All but the wealthiest of his pupils received their lessons for free, a tribute to the kindness Gassmann had shown Salieri as a penniless orphan.

In 1772, Empress Maria Theresa commented on her preference of Italian composers over Germans like Gassmann, Salieri or Gluck.

His musical heir in Paris was the composer Antonio Salieri, who had been Gluck's protégé since he arrived in Vienna in 1767, and later had made friends with Gluck.

Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 to 1792, Salieri dominated Italian language opera in Vienna.

During the next three years Salieri was primarily concerned with rehearsing and conducting the Italian opera company in Vienna and teaching.

However, his time at home in Vienna would be quickly brought to a close when an opportunity to write an opera for Paris arose, again through the patronage of Gluck Salieri traveled abroad to fulfill an important commission.

Upon returning to Vienna following his success in Paris, Salieri met and befriended Lorenzo Da Ponte and had his first professional encounters with Mozart.

In 1788 Salieri returned to Vienna where he remained for the rest of his life.

During this period of imperial change in Vienna and revolutionary ferment in France, Salieri composed two additional extremely innovative musical dramas to libretti by Giovanni Casti.

Mosel noted that these radical changes, especially the invasion and defeat of Austria, and the occupation of Vienna intertwined with the personal losses that struck Salieri in the same period led to his withdrawal from operatic work.

During his time in Vienna, Salieri acquired great prestige as a composer and conductor, particularly of opera, but also of chamber and sacred music.

In the 1780s while Mozart lived and worked in Vienna, he and his father Leopold wrote in their letters that several " cabals " of Italians led by Salieri were actively putting roadblocks in the way of Mozart's obtaining certain posts or staging his operas.

Their letters suggest that both Mozart and his father, being Austrians who resented the special place that Italian composers had in the courts of the Austrian princes, blamed the Italians in general and Salieri in particular for all of Mozart's difficulties in establishing himself in Vienna.

While Italian by birth, Salieri had lived in imperial Vienna for almost 60 years and was regarded by such people as the music critic Friedrich Rochlitz as a German composer.

However, even with Mozart and Salieri being rivals for certain jobs, there is very little evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after 1785 or so when Mozart had become established in Vienna.

She notes that she too once had dreams, having come to Vienna to study opera singing with Salieri.

* I. F. Edler v. Mosel, Über das Leben und die Werke des Anton Salieri ( Vienna 1827 )

The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese Classic or Classicism (), since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Antonio Salieri, and Ludwig van Beethoven all worked at some time in Vienna, and Franz Schubert was born there.

Upon his return to Vienna he was taught by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Joseph Haydn, and Antonio Salieri.

Shortly after John Patterson returned to England via Vienna, from where he sent Soane the first six volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, delivered by Antonio Salieri.

* Copies survive of a poster for a concert given by the Tonkünstlersocietät ( Society of Musicians ) April 17, 1791 in the Burgtheater in Vienna, conducted by Mozart's colleague Antonio Salieri.

* March-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart moves to Vienna to pursue his career, but is passed over in favour of Antonio Salieri as music teacher of Princess of Württemberg.

Instead, he approached Antonio Salieri, the most distinguished composer of Italian opera in Vienna and head of the music establishment at the imperial court.

He became ( after 1787 ) a student of Salieri in Vienna.

He chose to make the leap to Vienna in 1788, where he would have to compete with the many composers vying for a living and fame, all operating in the shadows of Salieri and Mozart.

Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers.

Gassmann's first act was to take Salieri to the Italian Church to consecrate his teaching and service to God, an event that left a deep impression on Salieri for the rest of his life.

While Salieri followed the precepts set forth by Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de ' Calzabigi in the preface to Alceste ; Salieri also drew on some musical ideas from the more traditional opera-seria and even opera buffa, creating a new synthesis in the process.

Upon Gassmann's death on 22 January, most likely due to complications from an accident with a carriage some years earlier, Salieri succeeded him as assistant director of the Italian opera in early 1774.

In 1774 Salieri married Therese Helferstorfer on 10 October, she was the daughter of a recently deceased financier and official of the court treasury.

Gluck feared that the Parisian critics would denounce the opera by a young composer known mostly for comic pieces and so the opera was originally billed in the press as being a new work by Gluck with some assistance from Antonio Salieri, then shortly before the premiere of the opera the Parisian press reported that the work was to be partly by Gluck and partly by Salieri, and finally after popular and critical success were won on stage the opera was acknowledged in a letter to the public by Gluck as being wholly by the young Antonio.

Mozart's Davide penitente ( 1785 ), his Piano Concerto in E flat major ( 1785 ), the Clarinet Quintet ( 1789 ) and the great Symphony in G minor ( 1788 ) had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who supposedly conducted a performance of it in 1791.

In the opera, Salieri attempts to poison an anachronistic Shaffer but is bumped by a " clumsy oaf ", which causes him to inadvertently poison Mozart instead and spill wine on his favorite coat.

They are interpreted as competitive siblings, with Lisa / Salieri being a serious, unappreciated professional and Bart / Mozart the successful, uncouth rock star ( complete with an opera based on " Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit " to the music of Eine kleine Nachtmusik ).

The scene where Obadiah Stane, the archrival of ' Tony ' Stark, the wealthy industrialist turned Ironman, tells Tony that he is being ousted from his company by the board, Obadiah plays the opening few bars of the Salieri concerto on a piano in Stark's suite.

When Salieri first meets him, Mozart is crawling around on his hands and knees, engaging in profane talk with his future bride Constanze Weber.

The play premiered on Broadway in 1980 with Ian McKellen as Salieri, Tim Curry as Mozart, and Jane Seymour as Constanze.

* Antonio Salieri wrote an opera tragicomica in two acts on the subject of the Catiline Conspiracy entitled Catilina to a libretto by Giambattista Casti in 1792.

At a formal commemoration on 8 April 1788 his friend and pupil Salieri conducted Gluck's De profundis and a requiem by the Italian composer Niccolò Jommelli was given.

Czerny went on to take lessons from Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Antonio Salieri.

The evening was based on Peter Schaffer ’ s play Amadeus and featured Marie McLaughlin, Della Jones, Sir Thomas Allen and Vanessa-Mae with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and Tim Piggott-Smith as Salieri.

The player takes the role of taxi driver Thomas " Tommy " Angelo, who, while trying to make a living on the streets of Lost Heaven, unexpectedly and unwillingly becomes involved in organized crime as a driver and enforcer for the Salieri crime family, led by Don Ennio Salieri.

Through a series of assignments given to him by Don Salieri, Tommy quickly becomes deeply involved in the activities of the Salieri business, concerning extortion, collecting protection money, bootlegging, assassination, arson jobs and a lot of unexpected gunfights, often with the opposing Don Morello, whose power Tommy describes as " built on violence ".