Varietas Delectat is a Latin quote written by Antonio Salieri to comment on his 1771 Armida musical drama, defined by the composer from Legnago as “a magical-heroic-loving style touching the tragic” (it is no coincidence that the show begins with the overture of this ‘Opera); and few know that it has actually written several times that it has resorted to the mixture of musical styles in composing its works. A metissage, to use a fashionable term, which makes Salieri forerunner then and extremely current today, which is being rediscovered after the defamatory insinuations of Pushkin set to music by Rimsky-korsakov and resumed first in the theater by Peter Shaffer and then in the famous film by Milos Forman who had even made him an icon of envy and mediocrity. Nothing could be more false. But even if today no historian would dare to support imaginative and obscure “noir” theories, the damage has been done and it is now the task of institutions such as the Antonio Salieri Foundation to restore dignity to his image through the enhancement of his musical works.

It is therefore within the context of the Salieri Opera Festival in Legnago that the idea of ​​rethinking Salieri is developed also through in-depth analysis and contamination of artistic genres that through his music can be enjoyed outside pre-established academic schemes. And it is the director Antonio Giarola, co-director with Angelo Curtolo of the Legnaghese festival since 2009, who has entrusted the choreography of Cristiano Fagioli and Cristina Ledri, artistic directors of the RBR illusionists of Dance, with the task of enhancing their great aesthetic-musical contemporaneity on the occasion of the 2010 edition, with an innovative dance show entirely inspired by his compositions, many of which are little known. The world premiere was staged in Legnago on 8 and 9 October; to then have an international circulation starting from spring 2011.