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?
