Mozart Although Antonio Salieri really existed and was employed as the chief composer to the Hapsburg court in Vienna for 36 years, only in fictional accounts did he plot to destroy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and finally poison him. As the A&E biography points out, no evidence exists that such events ever occurred despite the fact that Amadeus (1984) has always been a highly popular and well-regarded film. Other parts of the fictional film are more accurate, such as young Wolfgang's love-hate relationship with his father Leopold and growing desire to break free of his authoritarian control. As a child prodigy, Leopold had taken his son all over Europe from the age of six, including stays in Munich, Rome, London, Milan and Paris, where the boy was invariably proclaimed a musical genius. Even so, he had great difficulty securing paid employment in any of these cities and indeed struggled with

Serving as the Konzertmeister to the archbishop in a provincial backwater like Salzburg was certainly beneath his talents, and he was violent released from this position in 1781 after a violent argument in which the chief steward literally kicked him in the backside as he was thrown out. Virtually none of these earlier events are described in Amadeus, which is only concerned with Mozart's life in Vienna and Salieri's conspiracy to destroy him.
As the film showed, Mozart also had great difficulty becoming established in Vienna, and this may have been due to the jealousy of more established but less-talented composers. He made a living by taking in students, among them the very young Ludwig van Beethoven, who Mozart predicted would become a great composer. Only the success of his greatest operas, The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787) finally secured him the position of court composer to Joseph II in 1787.…