How this student found the music of a Salieri ballet thought lost for 200 years
'I don't think it was missing ... it was kind of hiding in plain sight': Ellen Stokes
When Ellen Stokes began to study Italian composer Antonio Salieri for her PhD, little did she know she would rediscover a long-lost piece of his music — or get to hear it played live in concert for the first time in possibly centuries.
"It's amazing to sit in a room and hear music that hasn't been performed in a setting like that, with a live audience and in its entirety, for potentially over 200 years," said Stokes, who completed her PhD at the University of Huddersfield in England.
"It was an incredible, incredible feeling," she told The Current's Matt Galloway.
Salieri was a famed composer at the time of his death in 1825, but today he has gained notoriety for allegations he poisoned his musical contemporary Mozart — a plotline of the Oscar-winning 1984 film Amadeus.
The rediscovered piece of music, Pafio e Mirra, is a 35-minute ballet that was believed to have been performed between the two acts of his opera Europa Riconosciuta, which premiered in 1778.
Prior to Stokes's research, musical scholars knew that the ballet once existed, but believed only fragments of it survived. A revival of Europa Riconoscuita in 2004 was performed without it.
Stokes reconstructed the ballet by sifting through the archives of the Austrian National Library, examining and making connections between different sheets of music.
"You're holding history when you're in an archive and with those kind of sources. It was a great moment in my research to be able to do that," she said.
Following her work, Nigel Morley conducted the Lincoln Pro Musica Orchestra in a performance of the reconstructed ballet last month, in what's believed to be the first live performance in 200 years.
Ian Kyer, a self-described Salieri enthusiast, said he was thrilled to hear about Stokes's research into the composer's under-recognized but "amazingly contemporary" music.
"It's evidence of the fact that we are now taking his music much more seriously," said Kyer, a Toronto-based lawyer, historian and author of Damaging Winds, a novel based on historical accounts of Salieri's life.
Kyer has studied the composer for decades, urging more people to listen to his music. He said the performance of the recovered ballet will give people an opportunity to do just that.
"One of the problems with getting people to appreciate Salieri's music is you have to hear it. People have to be performing it," he told The Current.
"So I am thrilled for her. I'm thrilled for everybody who enjoys good music."
Hiding in plain sight
Stokes's first clue to finding the missing music came from the composer's own handwriting, scrawled in the margins of a page she examined.
"It says it's the ballet primo, and it was in Milan in 1778. And he writes little stage notes as well," she said.
"That one page really opened up a lot of my research, and kind of opened up my question about the ballet in the first place."
But due to pandemic restrictions, Stokes's early research was restricted to the library's online files. She was able to put her theory to the test when she finally got to visit the archives in 2022.
She said she found a wide mix of documents, all variously "labelled as ballets or serenades or instrumental works — it wasn't very clear."
A lot of Salieri's works weren't published at the time, she explained. He also often reused pieces of music years after he had first composed them, which meant his sheet music and manuscripts were often jumbled up.
"Some of it survived in one source, some of it survived in another source. So it's really been piecing it all back together," she said.
Solving that puzzle involved some detective work. She examined page after page for clues — from notes in the margins to watermarks that were specific to Milan at the time of its writing.
"I don't think it was missing. I always say it was kind of hiding in plain sight."
Stokes's PhD supervisor, Steven Jan, said in a university press release that her work showed the importance of lateral thinking in music research.
"One has to speculate, come up with hypotheses and test them, making it a real detective job," said Jan, a senior lecturer at the department of music and design arts at the University of Huddersfield.
"Ellen has done really well to shed light on what has been a marginalized repertoire — Salieri is still a neglected composer," he said.
A Salieri renaissance
Toronto-based Kyer said he started studying Salieri decades ago, until it became what "my wife would [call] an obsession — I would like to say a passion."
He said he thinks that Salieri's music has been overlooked not because of its quality, but because of the rumours that his rivalry with Mozart led to murder.
"People just stopped listening to his music. It wasn't a judgment on the music. It was a judgment on the man as they perceived him, not as he actually was," he said.
Kyer's novel Damaging Winds aims to refute those allegations. He argues that Salieri and Mozart were friendly in most respects.
"He was a funny, pleasant, charming, extremely helpful person and one of the greatest music teachers of all time. His students include Beethoven, Schubert Liszt — there's so many," he said.
He's pleased that Stokes's research is contributing to what he described as a "Salieri renaissance."
"The more we study him, I think, and the more we take his music seriously and we start to get it performed, the more we will come to appreciate how good a composer he was," he said.
Audio produced by Paul MacInnis.
