The most offensive inaccuracy in the movie...

Honestly I think giving Mozart that brutal, nauseating laugh was infinitely more offensive.

Do you honestly think they were going for the most accurate movie to Mozart as possible?

Dodgeball is the best movie of all time.

A lot of people who watch this film fall into the trap of thinking [a] it's a biopic and [b] it's about Mozart. If it were these things then yes, it would fall very short of its aims and the (undeniably exaggerated) portrayal of Mozart would be wildly unwarranted.

However, it's a work of fiction and the focus is on Salieri and his struggle to come to terms with someone so much better than him at the one thing he's devoted his entire life to. It was necessary to "vilify" Mozart somewhat to hammer home the point of Salieri's plight. If Mozart had been an upstanding gentleman then we'd have no (or, at least, much less) sympathy for Salieri.

It's open to interpretation, of course, but for me that's the point of the film, and it's a story that we all face in our lives, probably many times. In fact, I bet someone comes on this board and writes a much better explanation of the film than me, and then I will be the Salieri :(

(I suppose you could still say it wasn't necessary to give him that annoying laugh or make him an actual alcoholic)

You know, I hate every single movie that takes historical characters and adds, deletes, or changes key aspects of their lives. Well, every single one except this one. For some reason, one of my biggest pet peeves in historical movies doesn't bother me at all in Amadeus. I think this film is fantastic and one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. I guess that may be because almost everything in this film is clearly fiction; the filmmakers didn't want you to actually believe that Salieri was insanely jealous of Mozart or that he wanted to kill him. Although I know nothing about the original play by Pushkin, I imagine he wanted to create a very personal human drama that the viewers could relate to with well known historical figures they would recognize. Similar, I suppose, to some of Shakespeare's historical plays.

Many incidents in the movie are documented in MOZART: HIS CHARACTER, HIS WORK by Alfred Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1945.) (Translated into English by Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder.)

Your question is flawed for several reasons: Was Mozart alcoholic as the movie depicted? First, the movie really didn't depict him as 'alcoholic' that is one beset with addiction to alcohol. It did show him drinking alcohol heavily. Keep in mind, alcohol in those days was much more alcoholic than it is today. wine was also very sweet. Also Mozart was a small man, so any kind of drinking 'spirits' would affect him more than a larger person. And depending on what he ate, depending on his diet, alcohol would affect him differently than a person on a full stomach.

Someone made this observation in another post, so I can't claim it as my own:

This is Mozart's biography according to Salieri... that is, an older Salieri confined to an insane asylum, whose mind is addled and memories are fading and confused.

The very use of the term 'alcoholic' is anachronistic in this context. I imagine that drinking was so common an activity at this period in history as a way of escaping the sufferings of life etc. that it was more socially acceptable than perhaps today. In any case I seem to recall from my earlier readings into the life of Mozart that he did often abuse alcohol as a way of mitigating the pain associated with his renal failure, from which he suffered since childhood.

Is it not true that he was a heavy drinker? And alcohol wasn't the killer... it was his obsession with the opera he was writing. He was over-worked.