In 1979, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus opened in London, earning raves for its dramatic power but raising the eyebrows of music historians for its central thesis: that the 1791 death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was hastened by a jealous rival, the considerably less talented Italian composer Antonio Salieri, a Kapellmeister who railed at God for bestowing immense musical gifts upon a conceited, profane, and (to his mind) undeserving younger man.

Shaffer, an acknowledged Mozart scholar, took facts from Mozart’s life and spun them into a gripping drama about Salieri’s attempts to derail the career of the young genius in Vienna, plotting his death and planning to pass off Mozart’s final work as his own.

According to historians, during his last days, Mozart thought he had been poisoned; Salieri was the target of rumors shortly after Mozart’s death; and Salieri claimed, in his dementia-ridden final years, to have murdered his rival. In 1832, Russian author Alexander Pushkin published a short play (later adapted into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov) suggesting Salieri had poisoned Mozart out of envy. It should be noted that Shaffer never claimed that his play should be taken as historical fact.

The Broadway production of Amadeus won five Tony Awards, including Best Play, and the 1984 film adaptation—written by Shaffer, produced by Saul Zaentz, and directed by Miloš Forman—won eight Academy Awards: for including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham as Salieri; Tom Hulce, as Mozart, was also nominated), along with Oscars for best art direction, costume design, makeup, and sound.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of the Forman film is its brilliant use of music. The filmmakers engaged renowned English conductor Neville Marriner to supervise the entire score, both the music to be performed on-screen and that to be used as underscore. Marriner insisted on strict adherence to the music as Mozart wrote it (“there’s been none of this brutalization of the original scores that has ruined nearly all of those romantic movies about famous composers,” he said at the time). Marriner conducted London’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields in all of the music prior to shooting. Filming took place over 24 weeks in what was then Czechoslovakia (Prague standing in for Vienna) and an additional week in Italy.

Playing under the opening titles is Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor (1773), written when Mozart was just 17. Salieri, in an insane asylum, plays a snippet of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1787) at the pianoforte, and as he recalls his childhood dream of becoming a great composer, the Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1736) is performed by a church choir.

As Salieri looks for the young Mozart at the Archbishop of Salzburg’s residence, we hear early-18th-century folk music, “Bubak and Hungaricus.” Mozart interrupts his game-playing with his wife-to-be Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) to conduct his Serenade for Winds, “Gran Partita” (c. 1781); and when Salieri writes a “March of Welcome” for Mozart at the Royal Palace of Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), Mozart goes to the keyboard and, improvising, turns it into the march from Act I of The Marriage of Figaro, “Non più andrai.”

Mozart conducts The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) to cheers from the crowd and conditional approval from the emperor (“too many notes”). The composer marries Constanze to the Kyrie from the Mass in C minor (1782–83). Constanze visits Salieri to try to convince him to approve Mozart’s court appointment, and as he looks over the scores, we hear excerpts from the Concerto for Flute and Harp (1778), the Symphony No. 29 in A major (1774), the Concerto for Two Pianos (1779), the Sinfonia concertante (1779), and the Mass in C minor.

Mozart walks the streets of Vienna to the Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major (1784) and, with his wife and father, attends a costume ball to the “Chorus of the Janissaries” from The Abduction from the Seraglio. At an outdoor concert, Mozart plays and conducts the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major (1785). He is seen rehearsing and conducting the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro (1786)—“God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar,” says Salieri.

We watch Salieri conduct his own opera Axur, re d’Ormus (1788), and Mozart conducts another masterpiece, Don Giovanni (1787). In the wake of Leopold Mozart’s death, the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor (1785) heralds the arrival of a mysterious man in black who commissions a major piece from Mozart; our first sampling of the Requiem (1791, unfinished; completed by Süssmayr, 1792) is the “Rex tremendae majestatis” as Salieri explains his diabolical plot to a horrified priest. Excerpts from Don Giovanni and Figaro are parodied in a wild, carnival-like atmosphere.

Mozart agrees to write a “vaudeville,” The Magic Flute (1791), but later he collapses in the pit, exhausted (his on-screen substitute conductor is composer John Strauss, who acted as on-set “music coordinator” throughout the shoot; his best-known work was the theme for TV’s Car 54, Where Are You?). In nearby Baden, Constanze is at a party where Mozart’s Six German Dances (1787) are playing. Back in Vienna, a bedridden Mozart dictates the Requiem’s Confutatis to Salieri. Mozart’s death and burial are accompanied by the Lacrimosa movement.

Salieri is wheeled through the asylum to the second movement to a reprise of the D-minor Piano Concerto, which continues through the end titles.

The Amadeus soundtrack album reached No. 1 on Billboard’s classical album chart, sold more than 6 million copies, and won the 1985 Grammy Award for Best Classical Album. As Marriner recalled in a 2015 interview: “What was so uniquely remarkable, after our work in London, Miloš took the finished recording off to Prague and shot the film around it, with the invaluable help of John Strauss to perfect the balance and synchronization. I am only sorry that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t have the wit to award a posthumous award to Mozart for Best Original Score.”

—Jon Burlingame