Secrets of the 19th Century’s Hottest Piano Superstar
What can Taylor and Beyonce learn from Franz Liszt?
Amadeus is one of my favorite movies, and I’m liable to lose 2 1/2 hours of my life whenever I come across it on a streaming service. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s the story of Mozart, who the movie portrays as a young virtuoso with so much talent that he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Art comes so easily to him that he’s a deeply unserious person, frivolously tossing off masterpieces without much trouble.
Mozart’s rival in the film is the composer Salieri, who is good at his profession, but not great (Salieri calls himself the “patron saint of mediocrities”). Music is hard work for him, and he can’t reach the level of music’s true geniuses. Salieri is outraged when he realizes God has bestowed such immense talent on the foolish Mozart, so he becomes obsessed with destroying the young maestro.
It’s a great movie, wrestling with genius, revenge, and jealousy themes. It’s got fun costumes, great acting, and, of course, compelling music. But it’s not very historically accurate. Though rumors did indeed go around in the early 1800s that Salieri had poisoned Mozart (Pushkin wrote a play with this premise in 1830, which inspired the film), there seems to be no truth to the stories about his obsession with…
