Pity the ghost of Anto­nio Salieri, “one of history’s all-time losers — a bystander run over by a Mack truck of mali­cious gos­sip,” writes Alex Ross at The New York­er. The rumors began even before his death. “In 1825, a sto­ry that he had poi­soned Mozart went around Vien­na. In 1830, Alexan­der Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ cast­ing the for­mer as the doltish genius and the lat­ter as a jeal­ous schemer.” The sto­ries became fur­ther embell­ished in an opera by Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov, then again in 1979 by British play­wright Peter Shaf­fer, whose Amadeus, “a sophis­ti­cat­ed vari­a­tion on Pushkin’s con­cept, …became a main­stay of the mod­ern stage.”

In 1984, these fic­tions became the basis of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, writ­ten by Shaf­fer for the screen. The film fur­ther solid­i­fies Salieri’s vil­lainy in F. Mur­ray Abraham’s Oscar-win­ning per­for­mance of his envy and despair. Like all great cin­e­mat­ic vil­lains, Salieri is shown to have good rea­son for his hatred of the hero, played as a man­ic tod­dler by Thomas Hulce, who was nom­i­nat­ed for the same best-actor award Abra­ham won. In their first meet­ing (above), Mozart humil­i­ates Salieri in the pres­ence of the Emper­or, insult­ing him sev­er­al times and show­ing that Salieri’s years of toil and devo­tion are worth lit­tle more than what the Ger­man prodi­gy mas­tered as a small child, and could improve upon immea­sur­ably with hard­ly any effort at all.

Is there truth to this scene? In gen­er­al, the his­to­ry of Amadeus is “laugh­ably wrong,” Alex von Tun­zel­mann writes at The Guardian, though maybe the joke’s on us if we believe it. As For­man’s film takes pains to show, what we see on screen is not an objec­tive point of view, but that of an aged, embit­tered, insane man remem­ber­ing his past with regret. Salieri is a most unre­li­able nar­ra­tor, and For­man an unre­li­able sto­ry­teller. The sup­posed “Wel­come March” com­posed for Mozart in the scene above is not a Salieri com­po­si­tion at all, but a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the aria from Mozart’s The Mar­riage of Figaro, which Hulce-as-Mozart then trans­forms into the actu­al tune of the aria.

Oth­er inac­cu­ra­cies abound. The Salieri of his­to­ry was not “a sex­u­al­ly frus­trat­ed, dried-up old bach­e­lor,” von Tun­zel­mann notes. “He had eight chil­dren by his wife, and is reput­ed have had at least one mis­tress.” He was also more col­league and friend­ly com­peti­tor than ene­my of the new­ly-arrived Mozart in Vien­na. The two even com­posed a piece togeth­er for singer Nan­cy Storace, who played the first Susan­na in The Mar­riage of Figaro. While Mozart wrote to his father of a shad­owy cabal arrayed against him at court, there is no evi­dence of a plot, and Mozart could be, by all accounts, just as puerile and obnox­ious as his por­tray­al in the film.

Mozart did die a pau­per from a mys­te­ri­ous ill­ness at 34. (He did not dic­tate the final pas­sages of his Requiem to Salieri). And Salieri did lat­er con­fess to poi­son­ing Mozart while he was aged and in a tem­po­rary state of men­tal ill­ness, then retract­ed the claim when he lat­er recov­ered. (“Let’s be hon­est,” writes von Tun­zel­mann, “nobody seri­ous­ly thinks Salieri mur­dered Mozart.”) These are the barest his­tor­i­cal facts upon which Amadeus’s infa­mous rival­ry rests. The Salieri of the film is a fic­tion­al con­struc­tion, cre­at­ed, as actor Simon Cal­low said of Shaf­fer­’s play, to serve “a vast med­i­ta­tion on the rela­tion­ship between genius and tal­ent.”

In For­man’s film, the theme becomes the rela­tion­ship between genius and medi­oc­rity. But to call Salieri a medi­oc­rity — or the “patron saint of medi­oc­ri­ties,” as Shaf­fer does in his play — “sets the bar for medi­oc­rity too high,” Ross argues. “His music is worth hear­ing. Mozart was a greater com­pos­er, but not immea­sur­ably greater.” Fur­ther­more, “amid the pro­ces­sion of mega­lo­ma­ni­acs, mis­an­thropes, and bas­ket cas­es who make up the clas­si­cal pan­theon, [Salieri] seems to have been one of the more lik­able fel­lows.”

Learn more about Salier­i’s life and work in Ross’s New York­er pro­file, and hear “4 Operas by Anto­nio Salieri You Should Lis­ten To” at Opera Wire.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mozart’s Diary Where He Com­posed His Final Mas­ter­pieces Is Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

The Let­ters of Mozart’s Sis­ter Maria Anna Get Trans­formed into Music

Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musi­cal Prodi­gy Like Her Broth­er Wolf­gang, So Why Did She Get Erased from His­to­ry?

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness