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Abstract: The main subject of study in this article is the internal conflict of the tragedy of A. S. Pushkin “Mozart and Salieri”. The object of the study is the rhythmic composition of the text in a broad sense, including the alternation of replicas of the main actors and the so-called “musical replicas” introduced by the author’s remarks. They are considered in the historical and cultural context of the rhetorical tradition, the oblivion of which inevitably led to the subsequent “recoding” of the semantic constants of the text of the tragedy. The paper questions the stereotype of Mozart as a protagonist and Salieri as an antagonist in the development of a tragic conflict. The proposed critical, and later literary reconstructions of the internal logic of the origin and development of the conflict in Mozart and Salieri are devoid, in our opinion, of the most important component – tragedy, assuming the fundamental insolubility of the dramatic conflict. This fact is one of the reasons for the “genre rethinking” of “small tragedies” in the studies of the last quarter of XX – early XXI centuries, the desire to see them in the connection (and even the displacement) of the dramatic view of the world lyrical or epic. Additional motivation for a new interpretation of the tragedy is the fact that the traditional consideration of Salieri as the antagonist, inevitably confronts the tragedy of the other three, where the protagonists – albert, the don Juan and Walsingham – embody the intimate and personal, the autobiographical the beginning. A special burden in the rhythmic development of the conflict is the inverse relationship of “musical” and “verbal” replicas. On the one hand, it is the decreasing volume of Salieri’s monologues and the increasing volume of musical excerpts. On the other hand, the dynamics of emotional dominants: the solemn pathetic of Salieri’s first monologue is replaced by the passionate instability and internal polemics of the second and the desperate confusion of the third, while Mozart’s music sounds first in the “parody” version, then – as a dramatically tense fragment and, finally, as a solemn mourning music.