I've been having a friendly argument for much of the morning with someone about this subject, as it pertains to Wagner. My idea is that once I've heard every other piece of music on the planet by every other composer who ever lived, I'll then start on Wagner's stuff. Until then - there are many more worthy.

And it's not that I couldn't appreciate his music otherwise. I just don't WANT to appreicate it, that's all. Maybe I'm being silly and I know there are lots of other composers who were horrid people - but this guy contributed to the whole political and cultural framework that set the stage for the Third Reich, and had he lived a little later probably WOULD have been a card-carrying member. I felt the same way while studying Heidegger in university, although I didn't have much choice but to study him if I wanted to pass my existentialism and philosophy of mind courses. And there's slightly more justification for reading Heidegger than for listening to Wagner, because Heidegger actually contributed new and unique concepts to the field of philosophy, whereas Wagner, while composing unique music, probably didn't contribute any new concepts to the field of music. So he's just one of many, and I can live without hearing it, at least until I've heard every other composer out there.

Music to me is a product of a person's soul, their outlook, their experiences, and their prejudices. And his soul was sick. When I listen to someone sing, or to music that someone has composed, I feel that I have a window into their inner core. When I hear someone's music, it is inextricably linked to that person as a human being. So if I listen to Wagner KNOWING that it's Wagner, then I will not be able to help but associate it with his very dark world views. If I listen to Wagner not knowing that it's his music, or not knowing anything about him as a person, then yes, I might be able to enjoy it. But it spoils it for me if I know that he wrote it, knowing what kind of person he was.

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this guy contributed to the whole political and cultural framework that set the stage for the Third Reich, and had he lived a little later probably WOULD have been a card-carrying member. I

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How do you know this? How much of this do you know? How much of this did he know?

Those are honest questions -- I'm not baiting you, and I don't know enough of the life to convict the work. I know some, but not enough to go beyond my usual response to romantic attempts to do the epic/heroic, which is to experience them as romantic attempts to do the epic/heroic.

This kind of question arises often in literary history, especially with the kind of indefinable texts that I worked on in the C17-C18. Certain ideologues, eg, seem determined to tar the (to me) wonderful German Aufklarer J.G. von Herder (1744-1803) with the incipient-Nazi taint, simply because he meditated upon cultural essences.

To me, that sort of anachronism is either silly or mischievous. To me, the prototypical "roots hunters" were the Nazis themselves: they went lolloping through the whole of Indo-European history, picking up attractive sources and symbols like crazed magpies, and it just makes no sense to me to convict any of the earlier cultures they raided of being incipient Nazis.

The crime, the intellectual crime in the first place, was the exploitation of serious thought or genuine tradition by perverted rip-off artists.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Now, I know that Wagner is not quite so far removed from what happened under the Third Reich, and certainly members of his family were guilty of collaboration. But how do you draw a direct connection to his music?

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It's not so much that there is a direct connection between Wagner's music and Naziism or anti-Semitism. I mean, I don't hear a certain combination of notes and say, "Hey, that's the Jew-hating chord!"

I guess it's more personal than that for me. If I heard a piece and it was Wagner and I didn't know it, I wouldn't be able to tell instinctively that an anti-semite wrote it. There's nothing intrinsically anti-semitic about his music necessarily. But for me, when I know someone has a certain point of view, or is racist or prejudiced or has done terrible things to other people, it colours my own perception of their creative efforts, and I find myself unable to listen to or read or look at someone's art without that thought in the back of my mind tainting my experience of their work.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Wagner died decades before the Third Reich came to be, so I'm not sure I can hold it against him that Hitler loved him so much. Sure, he was hyper-nationalist, but back then, who wasn't? Even his anti-Semitism was pretty much par for the course in his day and age. Not something to be endorsed, of course, but not beyond the pale... at least not so much as to call for a boycott, IMHO.

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Would people be able to say, "I can separate the poet from the poem. I can appreciate the love poetry that comes from the same heart and soul that could carry out the murders of (was it 11 million?) people because of their religion, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation."

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When I listen to someone sing, or to music that someone has composed, I feel that I have a window into their inner core. When I hear someone's music, it is inextricably linked to that person as a human being. So if I listen to Wagner KNOWING that it's Wagner, then I will not be able to help but associate it with his very dark world views. If I listen to Wagner not knowing that it's his music, or not knowing anything about him as a person, then yes, I might be able to enjoy it.

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The important thing is, as Barenboim points out in 'lance's link (thank you for that, 'lance), is that art--and I'm talking about really great art--can't help but become more than the individual making it. The private view of a truly great artist is significant, but by no means the beginning middle and end of his or her work. For that reason, a love poem by Hitler, the real Hitler, would I am sure, be mediocre. If we pretend that Hitler was a truly great artist, I would expect that his work would have transcended his personal limitations. It could not be otherwise.

Consider Francis Bacon. My God.

[ 21 June 2004: Message edited by: bittersweet ]

The Ring Trilogy, Gottedammerung, etc. etc. fascinated Hitler for very good reason. They celebrated a pagan ethos, a primitivism "beyond good and evil".

As we have discussed elsewhere, Wagner celebrated myth as the arbiter of truth and justice. He spurned any of the Christian beliefs which soften
ed the earlier warrior ethic.

Wagnerian music is IDEOLOGY. The music is accompanied by texts which celebrate power, tradition, masculinity, and hierarchy.

Now, maybe some people can close their eyes and pretend it is just pretty sounds, but certainly that was not Wagner's intention. As soon as you learn what Wagner was really about, it becomes clear that he wanted a new Wotan instead of "feminine democracy" for the Fatherland.

Similarly, like jeff house, I have read that Wagner's music was very important to Hitler, and so it takes on an added significance that other music would not.

To round out the discussion, Nietzsche is still discussed in philosophy courses even though his writings and work were used by the Third Reich to justify doctrines of racial superiority. It has been excused on the basis that his sister manipulated his work to make it more "acceptable" to the Nazis, but can I then trust any future edition of Nietzsche's work, knowing that perhaps his sister's changes made it into print, permanently?

Similarly, reading Karl Marx suffers from its associations with the Stalinist and Maoist regimes, both of which used Marx as the basic justification for what they did.

Oh yeah, that and the Bible. The Gospel of the Apocalypse was another influence on Charles Manson.

Here's a little tune he wrote sometime after his first nervous breakdown:

Love and Mercy - Brian Wilson

I was sittin' in a crummy movie with my hands on my chin
Oh the violence that occurs seems like we never win

Love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight

I was lyin' in my room and the news came on T.V.
A lotta people out there hurtin' and it really scares me

Love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight

I was standin' in a bar and watchin' all the people there
Oh the lonliness in this world well it's just not fair

Oooooo-ooooooo-ooooooo
Oooooo-ooooooo-ooooooo-ooooooo-ooooooo
Ahhhhh-ahhhhhh-ahhhhhh-ohhhhhh-ohhhhhh

Hey love and mercy that's what you need tonight
So, love and mercy to you and your friends tonight

Love and mercy that's what you need tonight
Love and mercy tonight

Love and mercy

Pity about Knut Hamsun. His Growth of the Soil is especially powerful.

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: flotsom ]

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Originally posted by DrConway:
To round out the discussion, Nietzsche is still discussed in philosophy courses even though his writings and work were used by the Third Reich to justify doctrines of racial superiority...I do not think it is easy to separate the art from the artist...

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Nietzsche, it should be noted, started out as one of Wagner's "disciples" but became one of Wagner's greatest and most perceptive critics. He saw Wagner's art as the outstanding example of decadence: "Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately: concealing neither its good nor its evil, having forgotten all sense of shame." and "Wagner represents a great corruption of music. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves,—and with that he has made music sick."

In my view, whoever values Wagner's art - as I do - can't simply excuse or dismiss his anti-Semitism. Although I would argue that his racism is not an integral part of his operas (except maybe his last, Parsifal), it is notoriously part of his biography and his prose works. He did not merely reflect commonly held views of his time; rather he actively promoted and endorsed racist views such as those of Gobineau.

As you might expect, however, I would disagree with jeff house's statement that "Wagnerian music is IDEOLOGY. The music is accompanied by texts which celebrate power, tradition, masculinity, and hierarchy."

I think this ignores other layers in Wagner's work. For example, the Ring cycle, can be interpreted (and has been, by George Bernard Shaw in The Perfect Wagnerite) as a "socialist" vision: the end of the gods = the fall of capitalism. (One of the reasons for the controversy surrounding the famous Chereau production of the Ring at Bayreuth in the late 1970s was that it reflected this approach.) Let's note in passing that it is not the hero, Siegfried (power, masculinity), who accomplishes this, but the heroine Brunhilde. Around the time Wagner began sketching out the plot of the Ring, he was very much into anarchist ideas and was associating with Bakunin. He was implicated as a leader of the 1848-49 revolution in Dresden and had to flee to Switzerland.

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Is a person "humming along" to National Socialism when he views Riefenstahl (and worse, appreciates the beauty of her work)?

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If you do not understand that Riefenstahl is quite explicitly teaching Naziism in her works,
you will just have to look harder. That is why she was funded by Hitler, not because her films are "beautiful".

The way that discredited movements return to life is by their art, because the ideas can be relegitimized. So people who decontextualize them are not doing us a service.

That is why it is dangerous to pretend that the ideas are not there, or they are somehow neutral.

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To talk about "layers of meaning" in Wagner also misses the reality, which was that Wagner was a celebrant of power, the power of the German race. Even for the fifteen minutes he admired Bakunin, he did so because of strands in Bakunin which are deeply repugnant, the Nechayev strands.

Wagner never believed in human equality; ergo he was never a socialist, no matter what Bernard Shaw may have thought.

Editted to add:

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Pity about Knut Hamsun. His Growth of the Soil is especially powerful. I will reserve my verdict on the man until I've read all of the biographical material -- which will happen never.

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Presumably you know that on the day of Hitler's death, Hamsun published a eulogy in which he said he would never cease to admire and "venerate Mein Fuhrer". He was tried for treason based on his actions during the Nazi occupation of Norway, and served a prison sentence.

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: jeff house ]

But this is not true of Wagner. According to jeff house, Wagner was actually pushing the ideology of German superiority and Jewish inferiority. Hitler didn't just pick Wagner at random because he liked his tunes, and then read a bunch of weird things into his music and his writings that weren't there in the first place, the way Manson did with Helter Skelter. Wagner wasn't misread. He pushed an ideology of anti-semitism and race superiority in his writings, and apparently through his music, too. (When I started this thread, I knew that he had penned anti-semitic essays and other writings, but I didn't know that his operas were infused with the whole German superiority thing as well - that only strengthens the argument.) It's true that he couldn't have known what would happen in the future or who would use them, or what the consequences would be. But his ideology was the same as that of the Third Reich, and it was part of a cultural preparation for what would happen.

[Edited to correct some atrocious grammar]

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: Michelle ]

But I think there is a difference from writing music and being anti-sementic and writing foul words about people and publishing them.

Every culture I know of has its own epic/heroic literature, and every one returns to that mode, in romantic re-creation, repeatedly, through the historical cycles.

If Wagner was an enthusiastic anti-Semite, then criticize his enthusiastic anti-Semitism. I doubt that you will do that effectively through fuzzy and ill-informed readings of his music.

Voltaire, eg, was also an enthusiastic anti-Semite, as he was an enthusiastic almost everything he did. Let me be severe: Voltaire was a vicious, vulgar, obscene anti-Semite. Now, his anti-Semitism can be contextualized, not that that makes it any more digestible when you're reading it.

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But to refuse to read Voltaire means that you're left with a significant hole in the middle of the French C18, which, given what was coming, is a super-significant hole.

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As long as he is read in context, and his faulty logics are pointed out. In the Nietzeche course I took his anti-seminitism and sexism was defended by a woman prof! I think I would have found it far less distasteful on the later if it had been a man. And for years I have struggled with that.

To read such authors and say "well everyone was antisemetic back then" isn't good enough either.

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: kuba ]

Here are some excerpts:

On Wagner's musical innovation:

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I think that if you examine these questions [of Wagner's ideas and his influence on others] carefully, and you examine his writings about music (especially his book on conducting, which I have found not only interesting, but very useful), you will find a number of influences on music and performance. First of all, Wagner had a great understanding of, or intuition for (or perhaps a combination of the two), acoustics. He was the first person to have that, I think, except perhaps Berlioz, and in a certain way Liszt, although Liszt was more limited to the piano. By acoustics I mean the presence of sound in a room, the concept of time and space. Wagner really developed that concept musically.

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On the "baggage" of Wagner, specifically the "idea or ideology" (Said's words) of Bayreuth:

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I can't answer this briefly. A few things have to be made clear. First of all, there is Wagner the composer. Then there's Wagner the writer of his own librettos - in other words, everything that is tied to the music. Then there is Wagner the writer on artistic matters. And then there is Wagner the political writer - in this case, primarily the anti-Semitic political writer. These are four different aspects to his work.

But before discussing them, I think it is worth examining the history of production in Bayreuth. Bayreuth began, under Wagner, as a great experimental theater. The whole world attended the world premiere of The Ring in 1876. Wagner also had, for his time, absolutely the most revolutionary and progressive ideas. He was a man of such forceful talent that he also invented the notion of the covered pit, such as it was constructed in Bayreuth. The pit at Bayreuth has been accepted by all modern acousticians as absolutely perfect; not only that, but it is impossible to imitate - which shows you that his talents and his genius went far beyond composing music.

... this whole fight to retain the theater at Bayreuth as it had been under Wagner, to my mind, made Bayreuth devoid of one of the most important characteristics of Wagner the artist. Productions there stayed almost exactly the same, in fact, until the Second World War. The Ring, for example remained the same production from 1876 until at least the 1920s - that's nearly fifty years. Bayreuth was the most conservative, unthoughtful theater in the whole world.

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On Wagner's anti-Semitism, specifically:

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The fact remains that he was a monstrous anti-Semite. How we would look at the monstrous anti-Semitism without the Nazis, I don't know. One thing I do know is that they, the Nazis, used, misused, and abused Wagner's ideas or thoughts - I think this has to be said - beyond what he might have had in mind. Anti-Semitism was not invented by Adolf Hitler and it was certainly not invented by Richard Wagner. It existed for generations and generations and centuries before. The difference between National Socialism and the earlier forms of anti-Semitism is that the Nazis were the first, to my knowledge, to evolve a systematic plan to exterminate the Jews, the whole people. And I don't think, although Wagner's anti-Semitism is monstrous, that he can be made responsible for that, even though a lot of the Nazi thinkers, if you want to call them that, often quoted Wagner as their precursor. It also needs to be said for clarity's sake that, in the operas themselves, there is not one Jewish character. There is not one anti-Semitic remark. There is nothing in any one of the ten great operas of Wagner even remotely approaching a character like Shylock.

...

Judaism was a subject of parody, there is no question about that. It was a subject of parody, and I'm sure that in the privacy of Wagner's house in Wahnfried, he and Cosima very often imitated Mime with a Jewish accent and with Jewish mannerisms, etc.; I don't deny that for one moment. On the other hand, you have to say that Wagner was in that respect artistically very open and, I would say, courageous, too. If he'd really wanted to make the operas an artistic expression of his anti-Semitism, he would have called a spade a spade, and he didn't. In other words, that he ridiculed the Jews is absolutely clear, but I don't think that this is an inherent part of the works.

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On the performance (or not) of Wagner's music in Israel:

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I think that Wagner's anti-Semitism is one thing, and the things that we have been forced to associate with his music are another. I would like to speak about the whole problem of Wagner in Israel, because I think it's linked to that. In 1936, Toscanini, who had been in Bayreuth, as you know, in 1930 and I think 31, refused to go back to Bayreuth because of the Nazis and I think because of Hitler's prisons in Bayreuth. He went instead to Tel Aviv where the then Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra was founded by Bronislaw Huberman and conducted the first opening concerts of the orchestra. In the program, there was Brahms's Second Symphony, there were some Rossini overtures, and also the prelude to Act 1 and Act 3 of Lohengrin. Nobody had a word to say about it; nobody criticized him; the orchestra was very happy to play it. Wagner's anti-Semitism was as well known then as it is now, so therefore the whole problem of playing Wagner in Israel has nothing to do with his anti-Semitism. What actually happened after that was that, after Kristallnacht in November 1938, the orchestra, which is a collective group of musicians who govern themselves and run themselves to this day, decided that because of the association with the Nazi's use of Wagner's music and how it led to the burning of the books - they refused to play any more Wagner. This is all there is to it. Everything that has come since then has been the reaction of people from outside the orchestra, some in favor, some absolutely against.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think this shows very clearly that one has to distinguish between Wagner's anti-Semitism, which is monstrous and despicable and worse than the sort of normal, shall we say, accepted-unacceptable level of anti-Semitism, and the use the Nazis made of it. I have met people who absolutely cannot listen to Wagner. A lady who came to see me in Tel Aviv when the whole Wagner debate was taking place said, "How can you want to play that? I saw my family taken to the gas chambers to the sound of the Meistersinger overture. Why should I listen to that?" Simple answer: there is no reason why she should listen to it. I don't think that Wagner should be forced on anybody, and the fact that he has inspired such extreme feelings, both pro and con, since his death, doesn't mean to say that we don't have some civic obligations.

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Said was simply in love with classical music, and opera in particular. Opera was his avocation, and his knowledge of the music itself, of performance, of the historical context of performances, was encyclopaedic and loving at the same time.

The one time I heard him speak in person, he was giving a public lecture on Verdi's Aida, and while some of his lecture was the great deconstructive exercise one would have expected on Verdi's own life, on Italian history, on British history in Egypt (the first performance of the opera was in Cairo), etc etc etc -- and that part was brilliant -- the rest of it was Said as fan, pure fan, a man laid out on the floor to hear Callas hit a note an entire octave above what her chorus had expected to hear, which audibly stopped her chorus for a second ... (That performance, I believe, happened in Mexico City.)

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What jeff house is saying, "essentially," is that he cannot abide epic/heroic art. Almost everything he has said about Wagner could be said as well of Homer or Virgil or the Icelandic sagas (ooh, but you don't want me to point that last out, do you, jeff house?).

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I was not aware that Homer was an anti-Semite, or that his art was dedicated and intended to opposing democracy in Germany. Virgil either.

I have no problem with people reading the Icelandic sagas if they are interested in Iceland, Norway, England, or associated topics. Indeed, I am hoping "Heimskringla" is on the exam this year, as I read it over the Christmas break.

However, I dislike those who think that Thor provides an appropriate role model for present day society. Wagner desired, and spoke out on behalf of, a return to the primitive.

Snorre Sturlason never did. Neither did Virgil.

In sum, it is useful and proper to know what were the actual ideas extant in Greek antiquity. But resussitating the idea of a "natural slave" and imposing it on non-Teutonic populations is profoundly reactionary.

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Jeff House wrote: That is why it is dangerous to pretend that the ideas are not there, or they are somehow neutral.

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Meanwhile, I was wrong about this:

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Barenboim just conducted a concert in memory of Said, I think.

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Instead, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Barenboim (who will also play piano), will play an Edward Said Memorial Concert this Wednesday, August 4, at 7:30 p.m., in the Barbican Concert Hall, London EC2.

Britain-based babblers, book from the Barbican before the box office is bereft of billets!

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In 1999 Said and Barenboim set up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with the aim of giving young Arabs and Israelis the chance to work and perform together and to learn from some of the world's best orchestral musicians.

The West-Eastern Divan is not a political project and Said was characteristically unsentimental about it: 'It doesn't pretend to be building bridges and all that hokey stuff. But there it is: a paradigm of coherent and intelligent living together.'

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Edit: this is thread drift, I grant, because the orchestra is playing only Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, not Wagner. Well, hard cheese!

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: 'lance ]

Enter art. The underpinnings of the doctrine then migrate to the margins, there to lay fallow for the time being.

Then, when those underpinnings are criticized for what they are, defenders of "art" man the barricades.

I haven't argued that Wagner's symphonies be burned. I argue only that it is important to look deep into Wagner's activities, his librettos, his writings, and see how the heroic music was specifically crafted to advance a political agenda, and a pretty nasty one at that.

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When a doctrine has the consequences Nazism did, it becomes impolite to support the doctrine publicly.
Enter art

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But isn't that somewhat of a modernist approach --- For centuries antisemites were creating art, literature, music. And even with the coneqeuences of the pograms and other attacks on Jewish people and those defined as "other" .... little mention was made until recently about looking into heart of the writer, composer, painter.

[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Jeff House wrote: I argue only that it is important to look deep into Wagner's activities, his librettos, his writings, and see how the heroic music was specifically crafted to advance a political agenda, and a pretty nasty one at that.

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I don't think we can reject the music's legitimacy as music on the basis of its context (Fascism), any more than we can reject the context's legitimacy on the basis of its music (its "pretty sounds," as you put it). Perhaps you agree. A person able to appreciate Wagner's music while alert to its context is not necessarily contributing to the relegitimization of Fascism.

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The important thing is, as Barenboim points out in 'lance's link (thank you for that, 'lance), is that art--and I'm talking about really great art--can't help but become more than the individual making it. The private view of a truly great artist is significant, but by no means the beginning middle and end of his or her work.

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and i'd probably take out the caveat about "greatness".

as bittersweet has said, there's no moral failure going if somebody fancies a book, oblivious to the fact that the author was a mass-murderer. nor do i think that there's any harm done if we know what Wagner was all about, and yet we still like his music--as long as we know the dangers of it and how to get past them. there are quite a few ideas that Muhammad Iqbal presents in his Urdu poetry that i disagree with very much, and yet i love the way he says them...conversely, when he says things i do agree with, i often dislike his style.

art can't help but exceed the artist, yes. and i think that it can also rebel against its maker. i assume, for instance, that Shakespeare was antisemitic (if i'm wrong, it's neither here nor there, just assume with me). but i was taught to read the Merchant of Venice in such a way that Shylock really seems a likeable character, and the Christians look like bastards. that reading is so ingrained in me that i find it hard to read it in the conventional way. so there's a conflict between my reading and my assumption that the Merchant of Venice is "really" an antisemitic play, with regard to the authorial intention. some sort of cultural shift could conceivably occur during which the context would be forgotten, and the pro-Shylock reading would become normative.

i was lucky enough to have an amazing Lit Crit & Theory prof last year. one of our readings was an essay by Chinua Achebe which claimed that Joseph Conrad was a racist and that his novel Heart of Darkness is an example of his racism. Achebe leaves you convinced that Heart of Darkness can be read as a racist novel, and the prof did not argue against this point, which gains much of its strength from Achebe's understanding of the author's character and intention. but during his lecture, he performed an incredible reading of what is arguably the most racist passage of the book, and flipped the white-black, civilized-primitive hierarchies on their heads in a very compelling manner.

anyhow, this is just my weird & juvenile fantasy, but i think that if Hitler had written an antisemitic novel, there would have been no sweeter revenge than to turn his work against him. there's nothing worse than finding out that something you've written has betrayed you.

[ 23 June 2004: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

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Originally posted by 'lance:
Whenever I hear a bit of Wagner I usually think either of Apocalypse Now, or "What's Opera, Doc?"

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Originally posted by kuba:

In the Nietzeche course I took his anti-seminitism and sexism was defended by a woman prof!
[ 22 June 2004: Message edited by: kuba ]

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Hang on. From what I've read about Nietzsche he was not an antisemite. He broke with Wagner in part because of the latter's antisemitism. Have you read what he says about Germans? Hilarious. He calls them "ruminants" and "cattle." He wasn't any easier on Russians either.

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I again remind readers who have ears for such things of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring, who employs moral mumbo-jumbo more indecently and repulsively than anyone else in Germany today: Dühring, the foremost moral bigmouth today--unexcelled even among his own ilk, the anti-Semites).
-GofM III.14

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there's nothing worse than finding out that something you've written has betrayed you.

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This web site actually categorizes the composers as either left or right in the political spectrum.

"Woody Allen quipped that every time he heard Wagner, he was overcome with the urge to invade Poland."

And I think whatever PM we end up with should sign a non-aggression pact with president Dubya, too, Woody.

Composers and Politics

[ 23 June 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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I don't have a clue about the classic composers, but I saw that Hollywood movie about Mozart and instantly enjoyed his personality as portrayed by the movie.

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It's an excellent movie. But Peter Shaffer, who wrote the original play and screenplay, was the first to agree that it was mostly fictional and speculative, for dramatic purposes. So far as anyone knows, Mozart wasn't really like that, nor was Salieri an envious mediocrity.

People who know about these things mostly reckon Salieri a good composer, but of course next to Mozart -- a child prodigy who delivered on his early promise, a very prolific composer, etc. -- most composers would seem mediocre.