And now the plot of the 1984 movie Amadeus, which suggests that Salieri poisoned Mozart, makes even less sense. The piece is “For the recovered health of Ophelia,” a singer who had worked with both composers, and was written in 1785, when Mozart was 29 years old and Salieri was 35. Its discovery after over 200 years came when the museum digitized its scores and a German musicologist, Timo Jouko Herrmann, compared the signature on this composition to others in the collection.
The piece was performed today for the first time to a small audience at the Czech Music Museum. Ulrich Leisinger, director of research at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg, commented that it is a “short, not great, piece.”