Long-Lost Mozart-Salieri Collaboration Found in Prague | Hacker News Reader

Long-Lost Mozart-Salieri Collaboration Found in Prague

abc.net.au

48 pointsadamnemecek20 comments

The movie Amadeus is about god-given genius versus mere human skill, and Mozart and Saliere are used in the movie as archtypes representing each. It is not intended to be historical, and the relationship between the two composers were totally different in real life.

It's a great movie, but it is not very historical correct, and does not intend to be.

Poor Salieri. Two hundred years after his death, he is loaded with such fake history. Also, too bad that the movie itself is so captivating that one almost wishes it was true.

It's certainly not accurate, but the characters are totally believable and there's nothing that does not make sense as long as you accept the premise of the movie. And the inclusion of Mozart's score is brilliant from beginning to end.

"It's certainly not accurate, but the characters are totally believable"

This is the major danger and trap all these films fall into. Our imagination of the past after decades of these films has nothing to do with reality.

Tom Hulce's portrayal of a cultured, clever, hardworking man as some kind of ethereal buffoon couldn't have been farther from reality. The false picture that it presents of talent would be harmful to those that it might have influenced.

The defense that the characters were meant to be iconic stand-ins is also undermined by the inclusion of so much accurate trivia (in addition to the many inaccuracies)

The character of Mozart in Amadeus is more frivolous, more alcoholic and more undisciplined than the real Mozart could have been, given his extraordinary compositional output over such a short lifespan. But the film also shows Mozart taking his art incredibly seriously and with a sense of great dignity. He's determined to make time for working very hard (even as he lays dying in bed), and fights movingly and eloquently for the commission of works he passionately wants to create. And that passion is shown to be driven by a need to express vital things about the human condition, with all its weaknesses and sense of fun and as well as its sublimity. He's not just a buffoon, the character has real depth.

The real Mozart on the other hand, as we know him from his letters, did have a penchant for the vulgar, for the irreverent, for scatalogical humor, for good booze, for pretty ladies, and all the rest of it. Of course that's just one side of him.

Young musicians aren't so incredibly stupid as to be "harmed" by Amadeus – it's clearly entertainment. One of its messages is that you can dedicate yourself absolutely to the development of your art while retaining a sense of playfulness. Another message is simply that this music is incredibly rich and exciting and profound, music you can explore for a lifetime.

Sounds like a criticism that could be made of the Sorkin Steve Jobs movie.

Almost every movie depicting famous artists have the problem that they rarely show the artist actually working - because this is really boring to look at. Performing artists like musicians, dancers etc. are more entertaining to look at, but writers, painters, mathematicians, scientists etc. are not cinematic. Composing is not very cinematic either, unless you use narrative tricks like intercutting with performance of the finished piece.

So in order to be watchable, the movies instead focus on the artists personality and private life, and the actual work part is reduced to the cliche of a flash-of-inspiration followed by a short montage of frenzied all-night work, resulting in finished masterpiece. This is of course an unrealistic depiction of the artistic process.

The movie Amadeus makes a point out of how effortless Mozart creates as opposed to Salieri who has to struggle and only gets mediocre results. This is really the romantic myth of the inspired genius, and by playing up the silliness of Mozart, the movie shows genius as a divine gift wholly separate from the persons daily life. Showing Mozart practicing, struggle, making false starts, iteratively improving, having to scrap work etc. would undermine the message of the movie. This is the absolute opposite of the modern 10K hours myth which states that anyone can be a genius through hard work and dedication.

What do you mean? I'm interested. Do you hace a link to a longer essay on the topic?

To be precise, the film is based on a stage play and character portrayal came from it, too. The theme of genius vs mere human can be traced back further, to Pushkin's short play "Mozart and Salieri" in 1830 [1].

But I agree that the movie is so good that many people would take it as "based on true story".

[1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pushkin/aleksandr/p98mo/

Is there a more slandered person in all of history than Salieri? This is the man who murdered the world's greatest musical genius in his prime out of jealousy ... except that he fucking didn't, and the notion is ridiculous. The man whose music wasn't performed in many countries as a result of this belief. The man whose name became synonymous with talentless mediocrity - just because we don't listen to opera from his period as much as we listen to some other stuff.

>Is there a more slandered person in all of history than Salieri?

Richard III of England comes to mind, but of course Salieri has been treated badly, not in the least by the well-known movie.

I'm taking a guess that you probably weren't a personal witness to the interactions between Salieri and Mozart and thus can't say for sure if he was involved with Mozart's death.

What is a historical fact is that Salieri openly and explicitly prevented Mozart's career from going where Mozart wanted it to go. Mozart's talent won in the end, but Salieri did go to great lengths to try and keep Mozart from thriving. He was well-known to have placed many walls in the path of work for Mozart, and this led to the reputation he has -- a product of his own making.

Whether or not he actually killed Mozart we can never truly know. But that there is this "rumor" that he might have is only due to Salieri's own awful behavior in the treatment of Mozart.

>What is a historical fact is that Salieri openly and explicitly prevented Mozart's career from going where Mozart wanted it to go.

Quotes from credible modern historians please. To my knowledge most historians think that there is no concrete evidence of this. There was just competition for jobs. Rest is drama added later.

>Whether or not he actually killed Mozart we can never truly know.

Good example of the false rumor. Salieri seems to even have confessed the murder when he was delirious but nobody believed him even then. Later he took that confession back.

Salieri's confession itself was never anything more than a rumor. Following his delirium and suicide attempt, it was said that he confessed to a priest that he poisoned Mozart, but there is no such written note or testimony (I suppose there couldn't be, since priests don't reveal confessions). Again, we can't prove with mathematical certainty that he didn't confess, but given that he had many mutual friends with Mozart and that they defended him from these accusations throughout this period, we have no reason to believe such a thing.

If you consider Mozart's own letters to be credible historical sources, he wrote about Salieri's attempts to sabotage his career.

There is correspondence between Mozart and his father about a cabal of Italians (especially the court composer Salieri) hindering him. I would say this reflects worse on the Mozarts than it does on Salieri, who spent almost his whole life in Vienna and didn't belong to any Italian cabals. In any case, Mozart established himself rapidly in Vienna and his complaints about Salieri, with whom he had friendly relations, trailed off.

This kind of thing is now a reason to accuse someone of the lowest kind of murder out of jealousy?

A great illustration of how the slander works: "we can never know". Of course we do know, to the normal standard of historical proof, that Salieri didn't kill Mozart: any sane historian would note the fact that Mozart died after a fairly prolonged illness, that his death wasn't considered suspicious at the time by his doctor or his family, and that rumors of Salieri's involvement started decades later, and that the supposed "Salieri's confession" doesn't exist, and would pronounce the case closed. It's not a mathematical proof, but that can't be the standard by which we dismiss baseless rumors, unless we want to keep around every ridiculous accusation ever made by people who were not even contemporaries to the events.

As for the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart, it seems that there was a short period of rivalry while Mozart was trying to establish himself in Vienna, and a longer period of amiable relations and collaboration (such as the music piece now discovered). None of this rose above the expected level (given that they had different musical styles), and it certainly doesn't make a composer who was otherwise not known to be involved in murders into a poisoner.

> The man whose music wasn't performed in many countries as a result of this belief.

What are you talking about? Salieri was actually REDISCOVERED precisely because of the movie. Before the movie his legacy had gone in complete obscurity.

History didn't start with that movie, you know. Salieri's work was not performed e.g. in Russia, where the influence of Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" was particularly strong, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. For part of the 20th century, I was a witness to that myself - I heard several times from friends who were musicians that Salieri's works are never performed because he is thought to have poisoned Mozart. This is why his music was obscure. If he is being rediscovered after yet more slander, well, that's good, but two centuries of the worst kind of lies and calumnies are still a bad way to treat a person, I would say.

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