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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
Amadeus, what a great movie. And we got to know Mozart better than we ever did before. But, the movie was fiction. There are a lot of books and movies which are fictional accounts of real events and real lives. Mainly, they add dialogue to the true story. How much of Amadeus was true?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy. His father took him on tour, when he was 6 years old, and the child supported the family for many years. He was a great piano and organ player, probably the greatest of his time. He also became the greatest composer of his time, effortlessly composing vast amounts of music in his short life. He died at the age of 35.
There was a bitter rivalry between Mozart and Salieri. They competed for teaching jobs and for royal commissions. Salieri and his friends belittled Mozart, and told lies about him. When Mozart died, there were (untrue) rumors that Salieri had poisoned him.
Mozart's behavior was sometimes bizarre. There has been a suggestion that he had Turette's Syndrome, in which a person compulsively swears and is verbally offensive. The evidence for this is not completely convincing.
In the movie, Salieri (wearing a mask) commissions Mozart to write a Requiem mass, and then helps him to write it. In real life, a man in a mask did commission the Requiem. It was the servant of a rich man, who planned to claim to have written the Requiem himself. Mozart, probably already sick, took the mysterious masked stranger, and the commission of a Requiem, as evidence that he would soon die. He died before he could finish the Requiem, it was finished (poorly, it would seem) by his student Sussmayr (Süssmayr).
Being pennyless, Mozart was buried in a common grave. His body was soon dug up and reburied in a more respectable grave. His wife apparently had a fairly profitable career, as an impoverished widow, begging for money from the King and other people.
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