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

( For the famous relationship between Mozart and Salieri please see below.

Shortly after this success Joseph II had Mozart and Salieri each contribute a one-act opera and / or singspiel for production at a banquet in 1786.

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.

For example, Mozart wrote in December 1781 to his father that " the only one who counts in Emperor's eyes is Salieri ".

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.

Mozart wrote to his father in May 1783 about Salieri and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the court poet: " You know those Italian gentlemen ; they are very nice to your face!

" In July 1783 Mozart wrote to his father of " a trick of Salieri's ", one of several letters in which he accused Salieri of trickery.

Decades after Mozart's death, a rumour began to circulate that Mozart had been poisoned by Salieri.

Carl Maria von Weber, a relative of Mozart by marriage whom Wagner has characterized as the most German of German composers, is said to have refused to join Ludlams-Höhle, a social club of which Salieri was a member and avoided having anything to do with him.

The biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer believes that Mozart's rivalry with Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of Princess Elisabeth of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead because of his reputation as a singing teacher.

" Salieri and his tribe will move heaven and earth to put it down ", Leopold Mozart wrote to his daughter Nannerl.

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.

For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own ; and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage.

Salieri and Mozart even composed a cantata for voice and piano together, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia, which celebrated the return to stage of the singer Nancy Storace.

In his last surviving letter from 14 October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he collected Salieri and Caterina Cavalieri in his carriage and drove them both to the opera ; about Salieri's attendance at his opera The Magic Flute, speaking enthusiastically: " He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not a piece that didn't elicit a ' Bravo!

* Within a few years of Salieri's death in 1825, Alexander Pushkin wrote his " little tragedy " Mozart and Salieri ( 1831 ) as a dramatic study of the sin of envy.

Salieri is characterized as both in awe of and insanely jealous of Mozart, going so far as to renounce God for blessing his adversary ; " Amadeus " means love of God, or God's love, and the play can be said to be about God-given talent, or the lack thereof: Salieri is hospitalized in a mental institution, where he announces himself as " the Patron Saint of mediocrity ".

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.

* Patrick Stewart played Salieri in the 1985 production The Mozart Inquest.

* Florent Mothe portrays Salieri in the 2009 French musical " Mozart, l ' opéra rock ".

* In a segment of The Simpsons episode " Margical History Tour ", Salieri is represented by Lisa Simpson, to Bart's Mozart.

Antonio began his musical studies in his native town of Legnago ; he was first taught at home by his older brother Francesco Salieri ( a former student of the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini ), and he received further lessons from the organist of the Legnago Cathedral, Giuseppe Simoni, a pupil of Padre Giovanni Battista Martini.

Sometime between 1763 and 1764 Salieri suffered the death of both parents and was briefly taken in by an anonymous brother, a monk in Padua, and then for unknown reasons in 1765 or 1766 he became the ward of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo ( which Giovanni is at this time unknown ), a member of the powerful and well connected Mocenigo family.

Salieri met Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi better known as Metastasio and Christoph Willibald Gluck during this period at the famous Sunday morning salons held at the home of the Martinez family.

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.

In November 2009 at the Teatro Salieri in Legnago occurred the first staging in modern times of his opera Il mondo alla rovescia, a co-production between the Fondazione Culturale Antonio Salieri and the Fondazione Arena di Verona for the Salieri Opera Festival.

But at the time of the premiere of Figaro, Salieri was busy with his new French opera Les Horaces.

Salieri was portrayed in the award-winning play at London's National Theatre by Paul Scofield.

Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera ( Chicago 1998 ), ISBN 0-226-71125-0 – ISBN 978-0-226-71125-6 ( preview at Google Book Search )

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.

The action then flashes back to the eighteenth century, at a time when Salieri has not met Mozart in person, but has heard of him and his music.

Salieri renounces God and vows to do everything in his power to destroy Mozart as a way of getting back at his Creator.

Amadeus was first presented at the Royal National Theatre, London in 1979, directed by Sir Peter Hall and starring Paul Scofield as Salieri, Simon Callow as Mozart, and Felicity Kendal as Constanze.

In 1787, he was given a paid position in the court of the Austrian Emperor, as Kammercompositeur (" chamber composer "), but authority in matters musical at the court was exercised primarily by Antonio Salieri.

This tells the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and court composer Antonio Salieri who, overcome with jealousy at hearing the " voice of God " coming from an " obscene child ", sets out to destroy his rival.

Other work includes Ripafratta in Mirandolina at the Royal Exchange Theatre in August 2006 which he swiftly followed by appearing as a well-received Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus.

* Antonio Salieri – La scuola de ´ gelosi ; L ´ Europa riconosciuta ( the latter was the first production of the Scala at Milan )

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

With his connections and influence, he was most likely the intermediary that allowed Süssmayr to apprentice with Salieri and Mozart, possibly with both at the same time.

Through Sam as his proxy, Salieri says he is impressed with Tommy's grace under fire and that he is indebted to Tommy for doing so ; at some future time Tommy may come back to Salieri for help.