Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is the historical and cultural frame Salieri invokes for his life in Vienna in 1781. He presents it as an age in which court musicians remained servants but were also learned artists, able to lend solemnity to ordinary lives; that ideal sits beside the competitive hierarchy of court employment and, in his later recollections, the struggle he sees himself waging against God through Mozart.

Historical Frame and Salieri’s Self-Presentation

Salieri dates his account to 1781, when he is thirty-one, a prolific composer at the Habsburg court, and already established in a respectable household. He calls the Enlightenment the still-current age, placing it before the French guillotine that, in his retrospective phrasing, would divide lives in half. The reference makes the period feel both present and vulnerable: Salieri speaks from within its confidence while looking back toward the violence that will mark its end.

His account is not a detached definition of the era but a performance of his place in it. He describes himself as a court servant and directly addresses the audience to insist that the familiar picture of musicians as compliant slaves is both true and false. They served the wealthy, he concedes, but were enlightened servants whose culture could give gravity to the everyday lives of bankers, clergy, soldiers, statesmen, and ordinary wives. The contrast defines the ideal he claims for court music: not freedom from hierarchy, but the power to transform the lives conducted within it.

Court Culture and Access to Employment

The play also makes the era’s cultural ideal inseparable from material dependence. Salieri’s ambition is to become Principal Royal Kapellmeister, a post then held by the seventy-year-old Giuseppe Bonno. The title and succession place artistic achievement inside a court structure where position and recognition are controlled by rank and access, not by talent alone.

Mozart’s attempts to secure work show how that structure operates in practice. He asks Count Orsini-Rosemberg for a recommendation to become an instructor to Princess Elizabeth, even taking the count’s hand and kissing it before making his request. Rosemberg replies that the decision is not his to make. Later, Constanze explains to Salieri that Mozart’s concerts do not pay enough to support them; what he needs are prominent pupils and, above all, stable employment at court. She asks Salieri to help secure the princess’s teaching position, saying that one word from him could obtain it.

Salieri instead shapes the terms of Mozart’s appointment as Imperial Chamber Composer. When Joseph II proposes that Mozart replace the late Gluck, Salieri recommends a salary of 200 florins rather than Gluck’s 2,000, justifying the lower payment as suitable for lesser duties. The exchange exposes the gap between the Enlightenment ideal of learned service and the precarious economy of the artists serving the court: a composer’s livelihood can depend on a recommendation, a ruler’s decision, and the value assigned to his work by a rival.

The Enlightenment in Retrospect

In the later frame, Salieri looks back on the Enlightenment from what he calls the last hour of his life. He recalls the moment when he resolved to obstruct God’s manifestation through Mozart, describing Mozart as the ground on which divine power and human rivalry would meet. The recollection recasts the period’s confidence in cultivated reason as the setting for a private, explicitly religious war: Salieri believes he can hinder God by impeding Mozart’s worldly success.

His recurring comparison between cats and composers supplies a more mocking measure of cultural change. He contrasts the cat associated with Domenico Scarlatti, which could choose themes suitable for a fugue, with the cats of his own day, whose taste he reduces to the high C. When he later hears cats singing to Rossini, he again treats their taste as evidence that composers and audiences have declined. These are Salieri’s satirical judgments, not an impartial history of music, but their contrast makes the Enlightenment a standard he repeatedly invokes: an age he associates with counterpoint and cultivated judgment, set against what he regards as a diminished present.

Significance

The Age of Enlightenment in the play is therefore less a broad historical survey than a contested ideal in Salieri’s narration. It names the culture that gives court musicians a claim to dignify ordinary life, while the employment episodes show how dependent that culture remains on patronage, salaries, and influential recommendations. Salieri’s later conflict with Mozart turns the same ideal into an accusation against himself: the learned servant who once claimed to elevate ordinary existence comes to understand his own actions as an attempt to obstruct the divine talent he cannot possess.