Henry Baker wrote: Perhaps the best analogy would be a movie about Mozart by someone who was
born deaf. No matter what anyone told this deaf movie-maker about Mozart's music, it would always be completely foreign hearsay, and could never convey Mozart's musical genius to someone who does know & love Mozart's work. ("Amadeus", of course, is the complete opposite, as it was made by people who really, really enjoyed & understood Mozart's music.)
I actually remember having the opposite impression at one point in the movie, where Mozart's genius is supposedly demonstrated by the way he improves a piece of Salieri's. The way he did this was by morphing one of Salieri's melodies into one of his own more recognizable themes (I forget which) --- as if musical genius were a matter of inventing catchy tunes. If such an interaction had really taken place between Mozart and Salieri, I'm guessing Mozart would have left Salieri's musical idea mostly intact and made subtle modifications to enhance it. But then most movie-goers would have been deprived of the impression that they were hearing the difference between a Salieri and a Mozart. Jim Propp