Antonio Salieri ( 18 August 17507 May 1825 ) was a classical composer, conductor and teacher born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, but who spent his adult life and career as a faithful subject of the Habsburg monarchy.

Salieri was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera.

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

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

This revival was due to the dramatic and highly fictionalized depiction of Salieri in Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus, which was given its greatest exposure in its 1984 film version, directed by Miloš Forman.

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.

Salieri responded to the reprimand by saying that the priest's organ playing displeased him because it was in an inappropriately theatrical style.

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.

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.

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.

His musical theory training in harmony and counterpoint was rooted in Johann Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, which Salieri translated during each Latin lesson.

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.

Salieri would also write several bravura aria's for a soprano playing the part of a middle class character that would combine coloratura and concertante woodwind solos, another innovation for a comic opera that was to be widely imitated.

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

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

However, in 1778 Gluck turned down an offer to compose the inaugural opera for La Scala in Milan ; upon the suggestion of Joseph II and with the approval of Gluck, Salieri was offered the commission, which he gratefully accepted.

In 1783 the Italian opera company was revived with singers partly chosen and vetted by Salieri during his Italian tour, the new season would open with a slightly re-worked version of Salieri's recent success La scuola de ' gelosi.

The original commission that reached Salieri in 1783 – 84 was to assist Gluck in finishing a work for Paris that had been all but completed ; in reality, Gluck had failed to notate any of the score for the new opera and gave the entire project over to his young friend.

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.

There is evidence that Mozart's contemporary Antonio Salieri tried to set the libretto but left it unfinished.

The Requiem is left unfinished, and Salieri is left powerless as Mozart's body is hauled out of Vienna for burial in a pauper's mass grave.

While living in Venice Salieri continued his musical studies with the organist and opera composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti, then following Pescetti's sudden death he studied with the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini or Pasini.

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.

In his old age Salieri hinted that these works were either purposely destroyed, or had been lost with the exception of a few works for the church.

Following the modest success of Le donne letterate Salieri received new commissions writing two additional operas in 1770 both with libretti by Boccherini.

Here Salieri returned to his collaboration with the young Boccherini who crafted an original plot.

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.

Les Danaïdes was received with great acclaim and its popularity with audiences and critics alike produced several further requests for new works for Paris audiences by Salieri.

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

) Salieri soon produced one of his greatest works with the text by Casti La grotta di Trofonio ( The Cave of Trofonius ) in 1785, the first opera buffa published in full score by Artaria.

Salieri collaborated with Casti to produce a parody of the relationship between poet and composer in Prima la musica e poi le parole ( First the Music and then the Words ).

Also as Salieri aged he moved slowly away from his more liberal political stances as he saw the enlightened reform of Joseph II's reign, and the hoped for reforms of the French revolution, replaced with more radical revolutionary ideas.

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.

As his teaching and work with the imperial chapel continued, his duties required the composition of a large number of sacred works, and in his last years it was almost exclusively in religious works and teaching that Salieri occupied himself.

And if Ponte is in league with Salieri, I'll never get a text from him, and I would love to show here what I can really do with an Italian opera.

* 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.

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.

A few directors like Luca Damiano, Mario Salieri, and Alain Payet continue with the " older " cinematographic and dramatic styles that often distinguish European pornography from those of other cultures.

When Salieri learns of Mozart's financial straits, he sees his chance to avenge himself, using " God's Beloved " ( the literal meaning of " Amadeus ") as the instrument.

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

In Vienna he began studying with Antonio Salieri and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger.