Steve Schwartz wrote:
>Shaffer has Mozart apologizing to the nobility. The nobility were
>generally just as crude as he was. The unbelievable point is not
>that Mozart was crude, but that the nobility would have taken offense.
>If Mozart had offended anybody by his speech, it would more likely have
>been the middle class, that group most affected by the Great Awakening of
>Evangelicalism in the 18th century. This speaks to the issue of exactly
>how much Shaffer knows about Mozart's times. I don't doubt he's read the
>letters. I doubt that he knows the cultural context of the letters.
The point is: he doesn't have to do (although I don't doubt that a
learned man like Shaffer knows the cultural context) - he doesn't have to
do because the movie is not about historical fact. It is art, you know,
not an essay on the culture of the Mozart epoch.
Robert