Did Salieri kill Mozart?
In real life, Salieri was not the jealous rival of Mozart and did not plot out his demise—he was an esteemed musical colleague of Mozart’s who later taught music to Mozart’s son. Toward the end of his life Salieri confessed to murdering Mozart—which might have been believable had Salieri not been confined to an insane asylum at the time of his confession. Did Salieri scare Mozart into writing his own Requiem? The origin of the Requiem does have an interesting story, but it does not involve a feverish obsession by Mozart with the ghost of his father. Mozart was commissioned anonymously to compose the Requiem by intermediaries acting for Franz Count of Walsegg, who hoped to pass it off as Walsegg’s own work. Was Mozart a silly, vulgar idiot with an annoying laugh? Mozart had to retain a degree of dignity when working at court and therefore could not have acted as he did in Amadeus. His entertaining letters, however, do reveal that he was playful and wonderfully quick-witted. He could som
