Vienna

Vienna frames the play’s contrast between public accusation and private memory: in 1823, its citizens condemn Salieri as a murderer, while he recalls a city that once revered him as one of Europe’s leading musicians. The city is not merely a backdrop to his confession. It is the audience before which his reputation is made, celebrated, and finally forgotten.

Setting and Dramatic Frame

The play opens in Vienna in 1823, with the stage dark and angry murmurs filling the theater. The citizens’ repeated denunciation of Salieri, accompanied by an accusation of murder, makes the city’s judgment audible before the audience can see those who deliver it. As the light rises, men and women in early nineteenth-century dress appear crowded together in the stage’s illuminated area. Vienna thus enters the drama first as a collective public voice: its inhabitants have already formed a verdict, and the aging Salieri must answer it.

The action later returns to Salieri’s rooms in November 1823, at three in the morning. From there he addresses the spectators as people of the future and asks them to become his last audience. His invocation brings the theater’s lights up, transforming an unseen auditorium into the posterity he has summoned. The scene makes Vienna’s relation to its audience deliberately double: the citizens who condemn him belong to the play’s 1823 world, while the spectators are asked to judge him from a later time. The city’s present-day murmurs and Salieri’s appeal to the future enclose the memories that follow.

Rumor, Servants, and the City’s Witnesses

Salieri describes Vienna as a city of slander, where stories circulate even among household servants. He says that only two servants remain with him, both of whom have served him since his arrival in the city fifty years earlier: one keeps him shaved, the other supplies his food. At three in the morning he dismisses them until six, insisting that he will not go to bed. Their surprised departure leaves him alone to address the audience he has been trying to summon. The episode gives the city’s public reputation for gossip a domestic counterpart: even the most private household is, in Salieri’s account, a place where stories may travel.

The citizens are more than a crowd surrounding the action. At the close of Salieri’s account of his career, they kneel and silently applaud as if worshipping him; then, when he describes the disappearance of his fame, they rise, turn away, and leave. Their movements make Vienna’s change of allegiance visible. The same public that once honors Salieri can withdraw its attention, and its departure gives physical form to the silence he describes as his punishment.

A Changing Musical City

Vienna is also presented as a city whose musical tastes change. In a later address, Salieri says that cats in a courtyard are singing for Rossini, and compares the public’s preference for a high C with an older cat’s ability to select themes suitable for a fugue. He recalls that the cat belonged to Domenico Scarlatti and was Spanish, from the Enlightenment. The contrast is Salieri’s pointed, comic account of musical decline: in his view, an earlier appreciation of counterpoint has yielded to a simpler crowd-pleasing sound. His complaint places the city’s cultural change in everyday listening, from the courtyard’s cats to the audience he addresses.

That complaint sits alongside the city’s former status as a center of musical prestige. Salieri calls Vienna the City of Musicians and recalls being revered there for thirty-two years. The remembered city gave him honors and acclaim, while the city of his old age seems to him to have moved on to other music. Vienna therefore holds two competing versions of musical life: the enduring public appetite that Salieri mocks, and the serious recognition that he once enjoyed but can no longer command.

Reputation and Erasure

The city’s musical institutions and social ceremonies shape Salieri’s recollection of his career. He says he remained in Vienna after Mozart’s death and conducted the Requiem that had been secretly commissioned by Count Walsegg, whose disguised steward had arranged for Mozart to compose it and intended to pass it off as Walsegg’s work. Salieri presents his own role in conducting it as part of his position at the center of Vienna’s major musical occasions. In the same account, he recalls directing the cannon salutes associated with Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The city that once made him a prominent musical figure also made him a witness and participant in events later attached to other composers.

Salieri interprets his long public success as a cruel answer to the fame he had asked for as a child. He was celebrated, decorated, and called distinguished, yet believed his own music lacked the worth audiences attributed to it. He then imagines Vienna’s attention turning decisively toward Mozart: Mozart’s music will be heard everywhere, while Salieri’s will be heard nowhere. At the moment of receiving what he calls his last award, a passerby mistakes him for one of the Generals of Waterloo. The street-side error reduces a celebrated musician to an indistinct figure from another history. By the time the action returns to his apartment at six in the morning, Vienna has become, in his telling, both the source of his former honors and the place from which his name and music are vanishing.