Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Mozart, Salieri, and Beethoven in Vienna
Oh, to have been in Vienna on today’s date in 1785! Wolfgang Mozart had just finished a new piano concerto a week earlier, and quite likely performed it himself for the first time as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio “Ester” by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf conducted by Antonio Salieri. Now wouldn’t that have made for a good scene in the movie “Amadeus?” Fast forward 11 years for another memorable concert at the Theater an der Wien, when on today’s date in 1806, it was Beethoven’s turn to premiere one of his new concertos in Schikaneder’s Viennese theater. Alongside works of Mozart, Méhul, Cherubini, and Handel, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was introduced to the world, with Franz Clement as the soloist. Beethoven’s friend Czerny recalled that Clement’s performance was greeted with “noisy bravos,” but a contemporary Viennese music critic wrote, “while there are beautiful things in the concerto … the endless repetition of some commonplace passages could prove fatiguing.” The reviewer’s final assessment? “If Beethoven pursues his present path, it will go ill with him and the public alike.”