Salieri Tries to Coerce Constanze in Exchange for a Position

Salieri Tries to Coerce Constanze in Exchange for a Position turns a recommendation into a sexual bargain. Salieri holds out a coveted tutoring position for Mozart, then makes intimacy the price of his influence. Constanze first leaves in anger, but returns ready to accept the transaction on its own terms. Salieri rejects her, revealing that his desire is entangled with envy of Mozart and a larger contest he describes as being against God. His subsequent actions expose the bargain’s practical consequences—and the gap between his self-presentation and his conduct.

The Offer and Its Terms

Salieri presents himself as able to secure Mozart’s appointment as tutor to Princess Elizabeth. He says he is dining with the Emperor the next evening and that a word of recommendation from him will win the valuable post; when musical matters are at stake, he insists, no one contradicts him. The offer rests on his real institutional leverage, not merely a promise of personal goodwill. Constanze believes he can deliver it.

He then introduces the other side of the arrangement. Still seated, he takes out a handkerchief and delicately wipes his mouth before naming a kiss as the reward for his service. Constanze asks how small that reward is meant to be. After she kisses him lightly, Salieri asks whether the payment seems fair; she gives him a longer kiss, and he tries to touch her. She pulls away and says the exchange is sufficient. Salieri counters that such payment is too small for a post every musician in Vienna desires. The sequence turns his apparently limited request into an insinuation of further sexual access: the promised favor and the desired reward are made to seem commensurable, while he retains the power to declare the payment inadequate.

Exposure and Withdrawal

When Constanze challenges the implication, Salieri rapidly denies having said anything. She rises to leave, and he rises in terror. He tries to stop her by presenting himself as awkward rather than calculating: he claims to lack malice, to live on ink and sweets, and to have little experience with women. He then admits that seeing her the previous night made him envy Mozart. From that envy, he says, came the thought that she might share some of her tenderness with him and inspire him.

Constanze does not accept this account as innocence. She calls him perverse and suggests that his modest provincial manner is a role concealing someone much cleverer. Her teasing comparison with the way she disciplines Mozart provokes Salieri into an angry insult. He immediately apologizes, returns to the employment question, and makes the condition explicit: he will examine the scores she has brought, while she considers his proposition; that, he says, is the price. He takes the portfolio from her. His alternation between denial, confession, anger, and formal bargaining makes the transaction harder to dismiss as a momentary misunderstanding. The threatened recommendation remains in his hands, and the proposition remains attached to it as she leaves.

Constanze Returns on His Terms

The next encounter reverses their positions. Constanze arrives while Mozart is away at an evening at Baron Van Swieten’s, where he is attending a concert of Sebastian Bach. Salieri dismisses the servant, and Constanze asks where they are going to do it, then proposes that they proceed there. Still wearing her hat, she deliberately loosens her dress, raises her skirts, and sits before him with a direct look. She converts his insinuation into an explicit offer and makes him face the arrangement he had devised.

Salieri looks back for a moment, then abruptly turns his eyes away. Rigidly, he tells her that her scores are there and orders her to take them and leave at once. Constanze calls him vile, grabs the portfolio, and tries furiously to strike his face. He seizes her by the arms, shakes her violently, and throws her to the floor. She lies still, staring at him with hatred, before rising and running out. The encounter therefore does not end in agreement or reconciliation: Salieri retains physical control of the room, while Constanze’s return has made his earlier coercion unmistakable.

Salieri’s Explanation and Conduct

After Constanze leaves, Salieri addresses the audience and acknowledges that he wanted her, then and more than ever. He says, however, that he wanted nothing insignificant or inferior. His explanation shifts the scene’s center from a supposed contest with Mozart to a contest conducted through Mozart, against the God who loves him. Constanze’s body and the career bargain have become, in Salieri’s account, instruments in a rivalry whose true opponent is divine. The explanation clarifies his refusal without undoing the pressure he applied or the violence with which he ended the encounter.

The immediate sequel tests his claims against his actions. The next day, when Katherina Cavalieri comes for her lesson, Salieri gives her the same suspicious speech about receiving a little tenderness and names her La Generosa. Unlike Constanze, Katherina accepts his advances. She eats twenty Venus’s nipples, kisses him with brandy-scented breath, and goes to bed with him; Salieri says she remains his mistress for years behind his wife’s back. The repeated seduction shows that his proposal to Constanze was not an isolated lapse, even though Constanze’s refusal to accept his shifting terms exposes the coercion in it.

That night, Salieri resigns from the committee for helping poor musicians. He then appears before the Emperor and recommends a man he calls talentless as Princess Elizabeth’s instructor—Mozart, the candidate whose appointment he had presented to Constanze as the reward for his intervention. The recommendation fulfills the career-related part of the offer, while the resignation abandons the charitable work associated with his public commitment to justice. His conduct does not establish that Mozart receives the post, but it confirms that Salieri does make the recommendation.

Dramatic Significance

The episode is built around a reversal of the bargain’s apparent simplicity. Salieri first defines a kiss as a modest return for a recommendation, then treats Constanze’s acceptance of that payment as insufficient. When she later arrives prepared to meet the demand he implied, he rejects the transaction and asserts control through force. The distinction he draws between what he desires and what he considers inferior belongs to his own explanation; it does not erase the leverage with which he made the offer.

The portfolio links the intimate pressure to Mozart’s professional prospects: Salieri takes the scores for examination, returns them when Constanze comes back, and later makes the recommendation he had promised. Against that concrete chain of actions, his confession about envy and God gives the episode its wider stakes. Salieri can present himself as the enemy of divine favoritism, yet his handling of Constanze, his affair with Katherina, and his abandonment of the poor musicians’ committee expose compromises in the very moral identity he claims. The scene makes his rivalry with Mozart operate not only through public musical judgment but through a private bargain that he both proposes and refuses to honor on Constanze’s terms.