Antonio Salieri – The Myth of Mozart’s Murderer

Was Antonio Salieri truly Mozart’s murderer – or the victim of one of music history’s most enduring legends? This film approaches the question like a trial.

Actor Tobias Moretti assumes the role of Salieri’s defender and opens the historical case files: the composer’s letters, his documented collaborations with Mozart, his rise in multilingual Enlightenment Vienna, his triumphs in Paris, and his late-life struggle against oblivion. Graphic-novel sequences give Salieri his own voice, while musicians and scholars re-evaluate his works and influence. Against the backdrop of Europe’s political upheavals – from the reforms of Joseph II to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars – the documentary reveals a man who shaped generations of composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt. Yet Salieri became a scapegoat, condemned by rumor rather than evidence. In the end, the audience acts as the jury: Was he the villain of an invented story – or the innocent target of a myth that outlived him?