Ray Bayles:

>This part of the movie was fairly accurate according to the histories I
>have read...  not that it is necessary to put this sort of thing on a movie
>screen...  but he was considered by many to be crass and rude...  and he
>was known to fart at music, composers and politicians...  his activities
>with women are well known...

What the movie fails to consider, however, is the 18th-century context for
this behavior.  Mozart was aping the manners of the nobility with whom he
mingled.  He would never have said, for example, as the movie has him say,
"Your majesty, I am a crude man." It wouldn't have occurred to him, any
more than it would have occurred to, say, Shakespeare to call himself an
educated one or to Dickens to call himself an alcoholic.  During Mozart's
day, this sort of prudery was really a middle-class deal - the result of
the evangelical Great Awakening, which still influences us.  So this is
essentially Shaffer's, I believe, uncomprehending comment on Mozart's
character.  Or perhaps it was simply dramatic license, so that he can
stack the deck even more.

By the way, for connoisseurs of crude, I highly recommend Mark Twain's
"1601," in which Queen Elizabeth and the intellectual flowers of England
discuss who cut the cheese.

Steve Schwartz