David and Art - Rock Me, Amadeus.

The BBC calls it the most misunderstood Oscar winner ever. Amadeus, the dramatic, semi-biographical movie about the composer Mozart came out in 1984—40 years ago. It won 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costumes, Best Sound, and Best Makeup. It’s one of my favorite movies—if not my very favorite.

 It was based on a 1979 play by Peter Shaffer with the same title. Shaffer, in turn, based his work on another play called Mozart and Salieri by Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin written in 1830—just five years after Salieri himself died. 67 years after Pushkin’s play, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov made it into an opera. So, it’s a story that’s had a lot of attention through the centuries.

And throughout those years, especially in the wake of the movie’s success, any number of writers have cataloged its historical inaccuracies.

There’s a scene in the movie where Salieri pledges his chastity to God if God will make him a great composer. People have pointed out that Salieri was certainly not chaste—he was married and had eight children. Mozart wasn’t a necessarily heavy drinker, but the movie shows him to be. While it’s accurate, as the movie shows, that Mozart did receive an anonymous commission to compose a funeral mass, it most definitely wasn’t some sort of complicated set-up by Salieri. (An Austrian nobleman named Franz von Walsegg was the one who commissioned it if you’re curious.)

The movie shows Salieri stewing with rage at Mozart’s successes, but he was a supporter of his fellow composer, cheered his works, and the two composed at least one work together. It’s true that for a while Mozart and his father blamed the Italian composers in Emperor Joseph’s court for closing off opportunities for German composers, but Italian opera was all the rage—it wasn’t personal.

We talked last week about J.M.W. Turner’s 1822 painting of the battle of Trafalgar and how much criticism it came in for because it wasn’t accurate in every aspect. The criticism didn’t matter to Turner at all. Should it matter to us? Does it change your opinion of anything to know that Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River is wildly inaccurate? Do you care that Longfellow’s poem about “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” is a farrago of inaccuracies? Where do you draw the line?

RECENT EPISODES OF DAVID AND ART

David and Art - The NEA Today

In this episode of David and Art, David Smith reflects on how history, policy, and personal perspective intersect in the story of a cultural institution.

David and Art - Art Looking at Art

Sometimes when art looks at art, it can show how many works can deepen our view of suffering—and the quiet indifference that often surrounds it.

David & Art - The Glasgow Boys

Host David Smith introduces us to an under-the-radar group of 19th-century painters who challenged the artistic norms of their time and pushed back against the gatekeepers of the art world.

David and Art - The Surrealist and the Celebrity, Part 2

This week on David and Art, host David Smith Smith looks at how celebrity can cloud our view of real achievement—especially when the artist becomes more famous than the art.

David and Art - The Surrealist and the Celebrity

From a creative youth and the influence of dreams to showmanship and celebrity, on this weeks David and Art, host David Smith digs into the fascinating trajectory of an iconic Spanish painter.

David and Art - Taking Care of the Public's Art

In this week's edition of David and Art, host David Smith dives into the fascinating story of how New Deal art—some of the most significant cultural creations of the 20th century—disappeared, and the ongoing efforts to track it down and return it to the public.

David and Art - Caravaggio

In this week’s episode of David and Art, host David Smith takes a closer look at a painter whose life was as dramatic as his art. From gripping realism to a life marked by violence and mystery, his story continues to intrigue centuries later.

David and Art - Culture and Place, Part 2

In this week's edition of David and Art, we continue to explore how culture shapes the identity of place, in particular the social value and impact of public art. Here's your host, David Smith

David and Art - Culture and Place

In this week's edition of David and Art, we’ll explore how culture shapes the very identity of a place—from the highways of Texas to a pub in Scotland—and how art fits into all of it. Here's your host, David Smith.

David and Art - A Space for Contemplation

What if a painting didn’t just capture a moment of action—but instead asked you to slow down and simply be? With this week's edition of David and Art on 103.3, Waco Public Radio, here's David Smith.