Posted on 02/24/2015 2:31:28 PM PST by Borges
It is 30 years since Amadeus swept the board at the Academy Awards. Miloš Forman’s 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, took home eight statuettes that night, including best film, best director, best actor and best adapted screenplay. Arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity, it has taken its place in motion picture history and is invariably described as a masterpiece.
All this is despite the fact the film plays shamelessly fast and loose with historical fact, taking as its basis a supposedly bitter rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his counterpart Antonio Salieri, court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, that may have been nothing more than a vague rumour. Alex von Tunzelmann, writing in the Guardian, is one of the many historians frustrated by the glittering success of a film that is so inaccurate, historically speaking. She describes it as “laughably” wrong – “a deadly rivalry that never was, a dried-up bachelor who was actually a father of eight, and flops that were hits in reality” – and reckons nothing about the film can redeem “the fact that the entire premise – that Salieri loathed Mozart and plotted his demise – is probably not true”.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Well, that’s the advance of technology. Go blame Gutenberg I guess, he started the arms race in entertainment.
You could say that about any artform. Shakespeare’s history plays were also unhistorical.
Great film as originally released. But the “director’s cut” sucks.
...As he threaded his way and literally managed to keep his head.
Well since we are turning this into guitar solo talk.....haha....Dio’s version of Dream On with Malmstein on the guitar is head and shoulders above the original.....David Ruffin’s slimmed down version of Smiling Faces (knowing his history with his former temptations group members) is an example of less being more....
Your concern is more with the technology itself then. And the mass media age. It goes both ways. The more info there is, the less of it sticks.
Well, obviously, you can find some outstanding solos with lots of notes. It’s not a requirement to be minimalistic.
But.... it is a common beginner mistake to make a solo too showy and busy than is necessary, so minimalism is a good cure for that ailment. I guess my point is that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should, and inexperienced players don’t usually know when they should.
About 25 years ago I traced my wife’s piano teachers, their teachers, their teachers’ teachers, and so on. Interestingly, I found that Mozart’s youngest child (Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, also called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Junior) was taught piano by Salieri. Junior was also taught by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a student of Mozart’s who for a time lived in the Mozart home. If there indeed was a bitter, serious rivalry between Mozart and Salieri or if there were widespread rumors that Salieri murdered Mozart, I doubt if Mozart’s wife would have allowed little Wolfie to have been taught by Salieri.
Whatever the quality of the music he composed, As Court Composer in Vienna Salieri was apparently quite the prestigious teacher for aspiring musicians. Musicians he taught included Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, Hummel, and Moscheles.
I know it wasn’t; I personally liked the movie, but it did have its smear on wealthy people.
It was an Edwardian melodrama - with all that entails.
A gent I know swears that after watching the movie in a theater the first week or its release, overheard a teenager come out of the movie saying “Great music, I wonder who wrote it.”
That sounds like an urban legend.
I look forward to the 2184 movie Hussein; audiences will delightedly watch the life and times of the amazing composer-president and his rival Bush.
Was it possible that salieri was actually even a little bit jealous of mozarts musical gift, of the music mozart made? What do the historians say about that?
Who wouldn’t be jealous of Mozart?
Nicely played.
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