Its time for my annual diatribe about the film AMADEUS. Despite being tremendous fun, and eminently watchable, it suffers from one rather serious impediment. Virtually everything of any note in the film is total crap and never happened in the way shown, and worse in some cases the truth was actually the opposite to the story. 1) Salieri, in the film is more or less Mozarts nemesis who is driven to madness and essentially conspires to drive Mozart into a mental breakdown, killing him. There is however, absolutely NO evidence whatsoever that there was in reality so much as a single bad word between the two men. Mozart was not shy to critique other composers and did so in his letters, which survive. No letter Mozart ever wrote contains the slightest critisizm of Salieri, and no evidence exists of any ill feelings towards him in return. The whole core of the plot, is essentially, from a historical perspective , therefore utter nonsense. 2) His wife is showd to be a devoted and dedicated woman who gave everything to develop Mozarts career and was hopelessly in love with him. The trouble is, she was a liar, and a fraudster. Constanze cheated on Mozard with at LEAST one of his own pupils, for quite a considerable period. So profoundly uninterested was she in Mozart, she didnt even attend the funeral, there was so little of Mozarts fortune "left" that she allowed him to be buried in an unmarked communal paupers grave. Literally just shoved into a hole in the soil with a variety of bodies and left. Constanze claimed later that she had not been able to attend as she was unwell and the dreadful weather that day made it unwise for her to be outside. The trouble was the city of Vienna has a very diligently maintained meteroligical station, and it turns out we know the weather that day was a lovely crisp bright, and DRY winters day. "Amazingly", after Mozart died, an enormous sum of money "appeared", and the money which his wife Constanze was shown to be in posession of later, would have been approximately sufficient to have built the entire Vienna State Theatre. (when she died 30,000 florins had "appeared" in her will to her family) Mozart, if anyone did, was murdered by his own thieving wife, who allowed him to live in utter poverty, and let perhaps the greatest musical mind in history die in virtual ignominy. Haydn (regarded as a truly great master at the time), was asked to teach a young Mozart, he promptly gave up, writing "the boy already knows it all", and "I`ve never seen such a gift from god in any human being" I happened upon all this by pure happenstance, as my Uncle in Germany, (a translator and professional musician, specialising in the Lute) was asked by the Hewlett Packard foundation to translate all of Mozarts original letters to English, he found the contents of them rather surprising !