I was not sad when Wolfgang Mozart died.
In fact, during the days leading up to his death - days that, for him, were reportedly filled with desperate work and a burning fever - were days that set me on the path to the happiest time of my life.
I do not wish to mislead you; I am not the heartless, jealous, pathetic creature that so many have created out of my story. The world looked at the evidence they could see, at the works of Wolfgang Mozart and of Antonio Salieri, and they saw a rigid man overshadowed by his boyish colleague. They saw my music fading into silence while his played forever, and they wove a story out of it.
They were wrong.
It was never my intention to destroy Mozart. That was Count Rosenberg's project, his obsession. Briefly I aided him, it's true, but there is an element missing from our famous tale, the piece that might excuse me in the eyes of the public as surely as it damns me in the eyes of God.
I mourned Wolfgang Mozart as earnestly as I could, but those days, as I said, were all but idyllic for me. Nothing really hurt, not even his unfinished requiem or the knowledge that there would be no more - no new music to engulf me, to tempt me and seduce me, to convince me to release all the beliefs I had always lived by, had always clung to like ivy to an oak... but it was too late for me by then. I was not strong enough to resist, and so I paid for my sins as I watched my work fall out of favor with the Viennese, watched my medals gather dust, watched as fewer and fewer heads turned as I passed in the street...
I cannot make myself regret the choice I made.
Even now that I am alone in silence, had I seen my future then I would not have changed my path.
They want to write my story as a tragedy, but they are wrong.
It was a romance.