Can Mozart and Salieri Work It Out?

Illustration by João Fazenda Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Poor Antonio Salieri. In other circumstances, history (or, at least, classical-music buffs) would remember him as Kapellmeister to the Emperor of Austria, a skilled court composer of some forty operas, and a mentor to Beethoven and Schubert. But he had the rotten luck of being eclipsed by a younger rival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Despite evidence that the two got along well enough, rumors spread in Vienna after Mozart’s death that Salieri had poisoned him. In 1979, the myth of Salieri’s malicious envy inspired Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus,” which cast Mozart as a spunky wunderkind and Salieri as the scheming “patron saint of mediocrities.”

Salieri’s bad rap was solidified in 1984, when Miloš Forman turned “Amadeus” into an Oscar-winning film. Now comes a sumptuous five-part miniseries, which aired on British television last year and has just come to Starz, with Will Sharpe as Mozart and Paul Bettany as Salieri. The other day, both actors found themselves at the Morgan Library & Museum, in midtown. Sharpe, known for his roles on “The White Lotus” and “Too Much,” had his hair gelled into a rock-star shag; Bettany, a fixture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wore hip glasses and a leather jacket. Their stop in New York happened to coincide with the Morgan’s exhibition “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg.” Many of the artifacts were visiting the United States for the first time.

The actors were greeted by the exhibition’s curator, Robin McClellan, who led them to Mozart’s childhood violin, encased in glass. “We had a nine-year-old prodigy from Juilliard come and play it,” he said. Across the hall was Mozart’s clavichord, on which he wrote the Requiem. “He was composing on his deathbed,” McClellan continued.