mozart! mozart! mozart. forgive me! forgive your assassin! mozart!
show some mercy! i beg you. i beg you! show mercy to a guilty man!
mozart! mozart! i confess it! listen! i confess!
mozart! mozart! i cannot bear it any longer! i confess! i confess what i did! i'm guilty! i killed you! sir i confess! i killed you!
mozart, perdonami! forgive your assassin! piet! piet! forgive your assassin! forgive me! forgive! forgive!
what do you want?
about what?
so?
what do you want?
leave me alone.
do you know who i am? you never heard of me, did you?
are they?
i do not seek forgiveness.
how well are you trained in music?
where?
then you must know this.
i'm surprised you don't know. it was a very popular tune in its day. i wrote it. how about this?
this one brought down the house when we played it first.
well?
can you recall no melody of mine? i was the most famous composer in europe when you were still a boy. i wrote forty operas alone. what about this little thing?
i didn't. that was mozart. wolfgang amadeus mozart. you know who that is?
ah - you've heard that?
and do they believe it?
do you believe it?
he was murdered, father! mozart! cruelly murdered.
he was my idol! i can't remember a time when i didn't know his name! when i was only fourteen he was already famous. even in legnago - the tiniest town in italy - i knew of him.
i was still playing childish games when he was playing music for kings and emperors. even the pope in rome!
i admit i was jealous when i heard the tales they told about him. not of the brilliant little prodigy himself, but of his father, who had taught him everything.
my father did not care for music. he wanted me only to be a merchant, like himself. as anonymous as he was. when i told how i wished i could be like mozart, he would say, why? do you want to be a trained monkey? would you like me to drag you around europe doing tricks like a circus freak? how could i tell him what music meant to me?
even then a spray of sounded notes could make me dizzy, almost to falling.
whilst my father prayed earnestly to god to protect commerce, i would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of. lord, make me a great composer! let me celebrate your glory through music - and be celebrated myself! make me famous through the world, dear god! make me immortal! after i die let people speak my name forever with love for what i wrote! in return i vow i will give you my chastity - my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. and i will help my fellow man all i can. amen and amen!
and do you know what happened? a miracle!
suddenly he was dead. just like that! and my life changed forever. my mother said, go. study music if you really want to. off with you! and off i went as quick as i could and never saw italy again. of course, i knew god had arranged it all; that was obvious. one moment i was a frustrated boy in an obscure little town. the next i was here, in vienna, city of musicians, sixteen years old and studying under gluck! gluck, father. do you know who he was? the greatest composer of his time. and he loved me! that was the wonder. he taught me everything he knew. and when i was ready, introduced me personally to the emperor! emperor joseph - the musical king! within a few years i was his court composer. wasn't that incredible? imperial composer to his majesty! actually the man had no ear at all, but what did it matter? he adored my music, that was enough. night after night i sat right next to the emperor of austria, playing duets with him, correcting the royal sight-reading. tell me, if you had been me, wouldn't you have thought god had accepted your vow? and believe me, i honoured it. i was a model of virtue. i kept my hands off women, worked hours every day teaching students, many of them for free, sitting on endless committees to help poor musicians - work and work and work, that was all my life. and it was wonderful! everybody liked me. i liked myself. i was the most successful musician in vienna. and the happiest. till he came. mozart.
one day he came to vienna to play some of his music at the residence of his employer, the prince-archbishop of salzburg. eagerly i went there to seek him out. that night changed my life.
as i went through the salon, i played a game with myself. this man had written his first concerto at the age of four; his first symphony at seven; a full-scale opera at twelve. did it show? is talent like that written on the face?
which one of them could he be?
so that was he! that giggling, dirty- minded creature i'd just seen crawling on the floor. mozart. the phenomenon whose legend had haunted my youth. impossible.
extraordinary! on the page it looked nothing. the beginning simple, almost comic. just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! this was no composition by a performing monkey! this was a music i'd never heard. filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. it seemed to me that i was hearing a voice of god.
but why?
why? would god choose an obscene child to be his instrument? it was not to be believed! this piece had to be an accident. it had to be!
there she was. i had no idea where they met - or how - yet there she stood on stage for all to see. showing off like the greedy songbird she was. ten minutes of ghastly scales and arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground.
understand, i was in love with the girl. or at least in lust. i wasn't a saint. it took me the most tremendous effort to be faithful to my vow. i swear to you i never laid a finger on her. all the same, i couldn't bear to think of anyone else touching her - least of all the creature.
at that moment i knew beyond any doubt. he'd had her. the creature had had my darling girl.
it was incomprehensible. what was god up to? here i was denying all my natural lust in order to deserve god's gift and there was mozart indulging his in all directions - even though engaged to be married! - and no rebuke at all! was it possible i was being tested? was god expecting me to offer forgiveness in the face of every offense, no matter how painful? that was very possible. all the same, why him? why use mozart to teach me lessons in humility? my heart was filling up with such hatred for that little man. for the first time in my life i began to know really violent thoughts. i couldn't stop them.
every day. sometimes for hours i would pray!
astounding! it was actually beyond belief. these were first and only drafts of music yet they showed no corrections of any kind. not one. do you realize what that meant?
he'd simply put down music already finished in his head. page after page of it, as if he was just taking dictation. and music finished as no music is ever finished.
displace one note and there would be diminishment. displace one phrase, and the structure would fall. it was clear to me. that sound i had heard in the archbishop's palace had been no accident. here again was the very voice of god! i was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink- strokes at an absolute, inimitable beauty.
yes, father. yes! so much for my vow of chastity. what did it matter? good, patient, hard-working, chaste - what did it matter? had goodness made me a good composer? i realized it absolutely then - that moment: goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. and i was nothing to god.
no? was mozart a good man?
all i ever wanted was to sing to him. that's his doing, isn't it? he gave me that longing - then made me mute. why? tell me that. if he didn't want me to serve him with music, why implant the desire, like a lust in my body, then deny me the talent? go on, tell me! speak for him!
oh? i thought you did so every day. so speak now. answer me!
oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! always the same stale answers! there is no god of mercy, father. just a god of torture.
evening came to that room. i sat there not knowing whether the girl would return or not. i prayed as i'd never prayed before.
from now on, we are enemies, you and i!
because you will not enter me, with all my need for you; because you scorn my attempts at virtue; because you choose for your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation; because you are unjust, unfair, unkind, i will block you! i swear it! i will hinder and harm your creature on earth as far as i am able. i will ruin your incarnation.
what use after all is man, if not to teach god his lessons?
go on. mock me. laugh, laugh!
that was not mozart laughing, father. that was god. that was god! god laughing at me through that obscene giggle. go on, signore. laugh. rub my nose in it. show my mediocrity for all to see. you wait! i will laugh at you! before i leave this earth, i will laugh at you! amen!
i'm sure i don't need to tell you i said nothing whatever to the emperor. i went to the theatre ready to tell mozart that his majesty had flown into a rage when i mentioned the ballet, when suddenly, to my astonishment, in the middle of the third act, the emperor - who never attended rehearsals - suddenly appeared.
so figaro was produced in spite of me. and in spite of me, a wonder was revealed. one of the true wonders of art. the restored third act was bold and brilliant. the fourth was a miracle.
i saw a woman disguised in her maid's clothes hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years, only because he thinks she is someone else. i heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theatre, conferring on all who sat there a perfect absolution. god was singing through this little man to all the world - unstoppable - making my defeat more bitter with each passing bar.
and then suddenly - a miracle!
father, did you know what that meant? with that yawn i saw my defeat turn into a victory. and mozart was lucky the emperor only yawned once. three yawns and the opera would fail the same night; two yawns, within a week at most. with one yawn the composer could still get -
what was this? i never saw him excited before by any music but his own. could he mean it?
would he actually tell me my music had moved him? was i really going to hear that from his own lips? i found myself actually hurrying the tempo of the finale.
so rose the dreadful ghost in his next and blackest opera. there on the stage stood the figure of a dead commander calling out 'repent! repent!'
and i knew - only i understood - that the horrifying apparition was leopold, raised from the dead. wolfgang had actually summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world. it was terrifying and wonderful to watch.
now a madness began in me. the madness of a man splitting in half. through my influence i saw to it don giovanni was played only five times in vienna. but in secret i went to every one of those five - all alone - unable to help myself, worshipping sound i alone seemed to hear.
and hour after hour, as i stood there, understanding even more clearly how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son from beyond the grave, i began to see a way - a terrible way - i could finally triumph over god, my torturer.
my plan was so simple, it terrified me. first i must get the death mass and then achieve the death.
his funeral - imagine it! the cathedral, all vienna sitting there. his coffin, mozart's little coffin in the middle. and suddenly in that silence, music. a divine music bursts out over them all, a great mass of death: requiem mass for wolfgang mozart, composed by his devoted friend antonio salieri. what sublimity! what depth! what passion in the music! salieri has been touched by god at last. and god, forced to listen. powerless - powerless to stop it. i at the end, for once, laughing at him. do you understand? do you?
the only thing that worried me was the actual killing. how does one do that? how does one kill a man? it's one thing to dream about it. it's very different when you have to do it, with your own hands.
i did.
i poisoned his life.
what difference does that make?
no, father. from now on no one will be able to speak of mozart without thinking of me. whenever they say mozart with love, they'll have to say salieri with loathing. and that's my immortality - at last! our names will be tied together for eternity - his in fame and mine in infamy. at least it's better than the total oblivion he'd planned for me, your merciful god!
don't pity me. pity yourself. you serve a wicked god. he killed mozart, not i. took him, snatched him away, without pity. he destroyed his beloved rather than let a mediocrity like me get the smallest share in his glory. he doesn't care. understand that. god cares nothing for the man he denies and nothing either for the man he uses. he broke mozart in half when he'd finished with him, and threw him away. like an old, worn out flute.
why did he do it? why didn't he kill me? i had no value. what was the use, keeping me alive for thirty-two years of torture? thirty-two years of honours and awards.
being bowed to and saluted, called 'distinguished - distinguished salieri' - by men incapable of distinguishing! thirty-two years of meaningless fame to end up alone in my room, watching myself become extinct. my music growing fainter, all the time fainter, until no one plays it at all. and his growing louder, filling the world with wonder. and everyone who loves my sacred art crying, mozart! bless you, mozart.
goodbye, father. i'll speak for you. i speak for all mediocrities in the world. i am their champion. i am their patron saint. on their behalf i deny him, your god of no mercy. your god who tortures men with longings they can never fulfill. he may forgive me: i shall never forgive him.
mediocrities everywhere, now and to come: i absolve you all! amen! amen! amen!