Differences Between A&E Biography Mozart and Amadeus 1984 Film

Mozart Although Antonio Salieri really existed and was employed as the chief composer to the Hapsburg court in Vienna for 36 years, only in fictional accounts did he plot to destroy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and finally poison him. As the A&E biography points out, no evidence exists that such events ever occurred despite the fact that Amadeus (1984) has always been a highly popular and well-regarded film.

Other parts of the fictional film are more accurate, such as young Wolfgang's love-hate relationship with his father Leopold and growing desire to break free of his authoritarian control. As a child prodigy, Leopold had taken his son all over Europe from the age of six, including stays in Munich, Rome, London, Milan and Paris, where the boy was invariably proclaimed a musical genius. Even so, he had great difficulty securing paid employment in any of these cities and indeed struggled with poverty throughout his entire life.

Serving as the Konzertmeister to the archbishop in a provincial backwater like Salzburg was certainly beneath his talents, and he was violent released from this position in 1781 after a violent argument in which the chief steward literally kicked him in the backside as he was thrown out. Virtually none of these earlier events are described in Amadeus, which is only concerned with Mozart's life in Vienna and Salieri's conspiracy to destroy him.

As the film showed, Mozart also had great difficulty becoming established in Vienna, and this may have been due to the jealousy of more established but less-talented composers. He made a living by taking in students, among them the very young Ludwig van Beethoven, who Mozart predicted would become a great composer. Only the success of his greatest operas, The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787) finally secured him the position of court composer to Joseph II in 1787.

Mozart produced over 600 works, including operas like The Abduction from the Harem (1782) and The Magic Flute (1791) as well as 41 symphonies. He died of a fever before completing his final work, the Requiem Mass, as was buried in a common grave in Vienna. All five of his children also died before reaching adulthood, which was uncommonly bad luck even by the standards of an era with high infant and child mortality rates.

In this, Amadeus was also accurate, although such burials were a common practice at the time, and Mozart certainly never achieved great wealth in his lifetime despite his fame. Despite dealing with only the last ten years of Mozart's life and then in fictionalized way, Amadeus remains intriguing mainly because of the truly villainous nature of Salieri and his unbelievably cold-blooded, calculated destruction of another human being.

In real life, Mozart did have a reputation for being irreverent and even vulgar, a heavy drinker and gambler who was always in debt, and that idea that such genius could reside in a buffoon drove Salieri insane. He felt.