Katherina Cavalieri

Katherina Cavalieri is a German soprano, a favored pupil of Antonio Salieri, and a performer whose success links Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera to Salieri’s private jealousy. She first appears as a twenty-year-old singer on the threshold of her career; later, Salieri describes her as his mistress for many years. The play gives her little direct speech, so her musical ability and personal relationships emerge chiefly through the judgments and recollections of the men around her. That narrative imbalance makes her both a character in her own right and a figure through whom Salieri tells a story about desire, self-control, and his own decline.

Identity and Musical Training

In Salieri’s recollection of Vienna in 1781, Cavalieri is his highly valued student. He describes her as a lively young woman with bright eyes and an inviting manner. During her entrance, she stands beside the pianoforte and mimes an impassioned aria while Giuseppe Bonno accompanies her. The stage presents her first through the physical and musical force of performance, before she has any substantial spoken role.

Salieri says that he loved, or at least desired, her, but had not touched her except accidentally while pressing her diaphragm as he taught her to sing. He presents this restraint as part of his observance of a pact with God. Even in his account of her musical education, then, professional contact is shadowed by erotic desire and by the moral rules he claims to have imposed on himself.

Cavalieri is German, though she performs under an Italianized name because she believes it will help her career. Mozart identifies her as his choice for the principal role in his opera and praises her as an excellent singer. Salieri responds that the naming strategy was his idea and calls her his favorite pupil. Her professional identity is thus shaped by practical accommodation to the prestige of Italian opera, while her teacher claims a hand in constructing the public name under which she advances.

The Premiere and Salieri’s Jealousy

At the opera’s premiere, Mozart has written Cavalieri the aria Martern aller Arten. Salieri judges its elaborate soprano scales and ornamentation excessive, describing the piece as precisely the sort of display a foolish young singer might want. His aesthetic criticism immediately becomes a sexual accusation: he concludes that Mozart must have slept with her in return for the aria. The play supplies no independent confirmation of this conclusion. It is Salieri who declares himself certain, and his suspicion is entangled with possessiveness toward a pupil he says he had wanted but kept at a distance.

Cavalieri’s appearance after the performance complicates Salieri’s picture of her as merely an object of rivalry. She receives renewed applause, bows to the Emperor, and is kissed by Salieri, who then presents her to his wife. The public ceremony gives her a visible professional triumph, even as Salieri privately interprets that triumph through his fear that Mozart has gained sexual access to her. Mozart later calls Cavalieri excessive and insatiable; Salieri answers more gently that her aria was excessive. Their exchange makes her vocal style a subject of artistic judgment, but also exposes how readily both men turn her into a topic of conversation rather than a speaking participant.

Salieri’s Affair with Cavalieri

After a separate encounter with Constanze Mozart, Salieri reflects that his conflict is not really with Mozart but with God, whom he believes has favored Mozart with incomparable musical gifts. He rejects the idea of accepting anything inferior in his own struggle, despite admitting that he desires Cavalieri. The distinction is revealing: he frames his choices as part of a contest with God, while Cavalieri remains someone whose desire and intentions are reported by him rather than explored in her own words.

Salieri later says that when Cavalieri came for a lesson the next day, he repeated a suggestive speech about offering tenderness and gave her a flattering nickname. He recounts that she accepted twenty of the suggestively named sweets he offered, kissed him with brandy on her breath, and went to bed with him. He says that she remained his lover for many years behind his wife’s back. These details belong to Salieri’s retrospective account; the play does not provide Cavalieri’s own explanation of the relationship. The scene therefore marks a sharp reversal in his story—from the teacher who claimed to keep his hands away from a pupil to the man who makes her his secret mistress—without giving her an equivalent account of that change.

Salieri connects this affair to a broader abandonment of his former principles. That same night, he says, he resigned from the committee that helped poor musicians; afterward, he recommended an untalented man as music instructor to Princess Elizabeth. He presents these acts as consequences of his moral deterioration after Mozart’s arrival. Cavalieri is part of the sequence through which he narrates that collapse, but the causal responsibility and self-condemnation in the account belong to Salieri, not to her.

A Later Encounter and Narrative Role

Later, when Salieri proposes taking Mozart to someone who might cheer him, he names Cavalieri. Mozart laughs openly at the suggestion. Cavalieri enters, now fuller in figure and wearing an elaborate feathered hat, bows to him, and takes his arm. The brief reunion invokes their earlier association without explaining it further: Salieri relies on a past connection, while Mozart’s laughter signals recognition and familiarity. Cavalieri’s return is again organized around what she can do for the two men, rather than around a stated purpose of her own.

Across these appearances, her musical career is tangible—the singing lesson, the leading role, the demanding aria, and the applause—while her interior life remains largely withheld. That contrast is central to her narrative function. Salieri first imagines her as a cherished pupil he must not touch, then as someone Mozart has taken from him, and finally as his long-term lover. His changing descriptions reveal less about Cavalieri’s private thoughts than about his own possessiveness and his increasingly unreliable moral self-portrait. Her presence consequently binds artistic judgment to sexual rivalry: the aria that demonstrates her public success becomes, in Salieri’s imagination, evidence of a private betrayal.