Well, "Amadeus" isn't _perfect_ ! You have a point. When Mozart was a child, he was a bit of a parlor trick; his father would take him around the countryside giving concerts in which the young Mozart "improvise" on tunes that someone in the audience would throw in. Of course improvisation was similar to writing an essay: you start by addressing the question that is asked, and you then morph it into something you can talk further about. So from that perspective the Mozart/Solieri 1-upmanship anecdote was pretty accurate. I have no idea if such an encounter with Solieri actually happened, though. At 02:48 PM 12/31/2014, James Propp wrote:

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