It is as true in every field compare Shakespeare to Shaw, Jordan to Barkley, Picasso to Rothko, Kennedy to Nixon. Almost-great writers (Mann, Galsworthy, Wolfe) make it look like Herculean triumph. Great writers (Nabokov, Dickens, Wodehouse) make it look like play. This is not a vulgarization of Mozart, but a way of dramatizing that true geniuses rarely take their own work seriously, because it comes so easily for them.

The movie's success is partly explained, I think, by its strategy of portraying Mozart not as a paragon whose greatness is a burden to us all, but as a goofy proto-hippie with a high-pitched giggle, an overfondness for drink, and a buxom wife who liked to chase him on all fours. When you consider that 98 percent of the American public never listens to a classical music station, it is astonishing that Mozart became for a time a best-seller, and not only to women assured by talk-show gurus that his music boosted the IQs of embryos. 'Amadeus' (1984) swept the Academy Awards and had a considerable popular success. True, Salieri plans to claim the work as his own-but for a man like him, that will be one more turn of the screw. Salieri hates Mozart but loves music more, and cannot live without yet one more work that he can resent for its perfection. This scene is moving not because Mozart is dying, but because Salieri, his lifelong rival, is striving to extract from the dying man yet another masterpiece that will illuminate how shabby Salieri's work is. The most moving scene in the movie takes place at Mozart's deathbed, where the great composer, only 35, dictates the final pages of his great 'Requiem' to Salieri, sitting at the foot of the bed with quill and manuscript, dragging the notes from Mozart's fevered brain. Others must fail.' Milos Forman's 'Amadeus' is not about the genius of Mozart but about the envy of his rival Salieri, whose curse was to have the talent of a third-rate composer but the ear of a first-rate music lover, so that he knew how bad he was, and how good Mozart was. They vote with Gore Vidal and David Merrick, both credited with saying, 'It is not enough that I succeed.

Happy people are pleased by the happiness of others.

Amadeus full movie english version