In April 1824, a curious rumor made its way into the newspapers of Paris. Following a performance of selections from Mozart’s Requiem, the Gazette de France reported:

Before the opening of this concert, it circulated in the hall, as positive news, that Salieri had come to accuse himself on his deathbed of having poisoned Mozart in an outburst of appalling jealousy! We recount this news without, however, having much faith in it, since for a long time the author of Les Danaïdes has been struck with a form of mental alienation, of which this voluntary revelation is only the sad and latest effect.¹

This story is, of course, familiar to anyone who has seen Amadeus, although you may be surprised to see it being told so early, hundreds of miles from Vienna. Antonio Salieri was still alive at the time. Some of his students, including Franz Liszt, were still concertizing in Paris, and you could easily go see Les Danaïdes for yourself, as his French operas remained in the Parisian repertoire far longer than his German or Italian operas did in Vienna. The story that Salieri murdered Mozart had not yet become the stuff of novels, theater, and film, nor had it joined the list of misconceptions that those of us teaching music history and appreciation often devote time to debunking. In 1824 it was simply musical gossip, with multiple journalists and members of the public weighing in on the lives and careers of fairly recent celebrities.

The strange reception history of Antonio Salieri’s life and career shows how the same piece of gossip can reflect an immediate historical context but also adopt a variety of shifting (and often historically contradictory) meanings. In musicology, “reception history” refers to the history of how a piece of music or body of musical work was received by different audiences after the composer’s lifetime and/or in different contexts from what they originally intended. For example, the reception history of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni includes the 19th-century concept of the Byronic hero, the rise of psychoanalytic interpretations of art, the development of filmed opera and Regietheater in the 20th century, and the #MeToo movement of the 21st century—which are all pretty far removed from the opera’s original creation and performance, but still inform how people interpret the opera.

Many of the things that made Salieri successful during his lifetime — international popular appeal, bureaucratic connections, administrative competence, and a “who’s who” of students (including Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven) — put his historical reception at a disadvantage when the Romantic period changed our ideas of what a “great composer” should be.² Meanwhile, Salieri’s “story” — even in supposedly nonfictional writing — became almost completely removed from his music and instead focused on speculation about his life, often relying on partially or wholly fictionalized anecdotes, claims, and conversations.