Amadeus goofs

Both Mozart and Salieri are portrayed conducting an orchestra in the modern manner — standing at the front and waving their arms. In the eighteenth century the conductor would typically play the first violin or harpsichord, with the other musicians watching his head and hand movements. It was the expansion of large orchestras in the nineteenth century that obliged the conductor to give up his instrument and assume a more visible position.

In the scene where Mozart joins the orchestra for "The Magic Flute", he is depicted performing the bell solo on a celesta. However, the celesta did not exist until 1886; the passage would originally have been played on a glockenspiel.

At the beginning of the film, the elderly Salieri plays the first eighteen notes of "Serenade No. 13 for strings in G" to his confessor, who then takes up the remainder of the tune. "Serenade No. 13 for strings in G" (also known as "Eine kleine Nachtmusik") was sold in 1799 by Mozart's widow to the German composer Johann André, who later published it in 1827, two years after Salieri's death.

Mozart is shown playing carom billiards with what appears to be a tipped cue. The first tipped cue was not invented until 1807. Additionally, the cue tip appears to be coated with blue-dyed chalk, which was invented in 1897.

During the opera/ballet sequence, the dancers wear costumes with clearly visible zips.

Mozart remarks that the music he is composing "is going to explode like a bombshell". However, the use of the word bombshell as a colloquial term for something sensational did not emerge in English until about 1860, and in German only in the 1890s — roughly a century after Mozart's death.

Whilst the confessor waits to enter Salieri's door from the asylum corridor, a woman can be seen wearing a red business suit jacket featuring conspicuous 1980s-style shoulder pads.

During Mozart's attempt to teach the daughter of Heir Schlumberg at the piano, he performs an extended run on the keyboard that employs a flattened 3rd, 5th and 7th — a pattern that today would be recognised as characteristic of a blues or jazz scale. Such scales did not emerge until the 20th century, and had they been sounded, even inadvertently, during the Classical period they would have been regarded as shocking.

The Nipples of Venus that Salieri eats are clearly coated in white chocolate. White chocolate wasn't developed until 1936 by Nestlé.

When Mozart is asked to play in the style of Bendel — referring to the German pianist Franz Bendel — he replies "I don't like Bendel." Franz Bendel, however, was not born until 1833.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was left-handed, not right-handed as portrayed by Tom Hulce, a discrepancy most apparent whilst he is shown composing at the billiards table.

The Emperor recounts an episode involving the young Mozart and "My sister, Antoinette", that being the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette, famed from the French Revolution. Francis, however, continued to call his sister by her German birth name, (Maria) Antonia.

When Mozart conducts "The Marriage of Figaro", the Emperor is visible yawning in the background. He appears to yawn again roughly two minutes later, yet Salieri explicitly asserts that the Emperor only yawned once during the whole performance.

The same shot of Kappelmeister Bonno observing from the box seat, with two ladies either side of him, is reused in the crowd shots of two separate opera sequences.

In the film's closing scenes, the bedridden Mozart, dictating a movement of his Requiem to Salieri, asks him to mark the bass instruments' notes as the "tonic and dominant" pitches in the key of A minor, yet the sounds heard and the notes actually written in the score are the tonic and the sub-dominant.

At Mozart's first meeting with Emperor Josef II, the Emperor completes playing the march for him; as he rises he lifts the parchment from the piano. When Mozart kneels to kiss the Emperor's hand, the parchment remains in the Emperor's grasp. Once Mozart rises again, the parchment has returned to the piano and stays there until the Emperor turns and steps back to pick it up.

When Mozart enters the bedroom late one night to look in on his son, the candles on the candelabrum he's carrying are shorter before he steps into the room than they are once he's inside.

Whenever Mozart is at the billiards table, the balls are in different places from one shot to the next.

At the close of the funeral cortege, Katerina Cavalieri lowers and folds her umbrella as the steady rain persists.

[Director's Cut] When Mozart requests a loan from Salieri, the cup leaps from Mozart's hand onto the table.

In the final act of Don Giovanni, the jets of flame beneath the backcloth fluctuate in height between shots and occasionally vanish altogether.

Mozart strolls through Vienna, sipping from a green glass bottle. The bottle then abruptly vanishes between shots and is not seen again.

Mozart's forehead is dusted with powder as he tries on wigs prior to his first audience with the emperor. However, when he removes the mask covering his face, his forehead is inexplicably clean.

When Stanze and Schikaneder argue over when Mozart will be paid to compose an opera for Schikaneder, the position of Mozart's arm round Stanze varies from shot to shot.

On Mozart's first visit to Emperor Josef II, two guards bar his way with swords held closed, each gripping the weapon with his right hand. When they finally allow Mozart to pass they open the blades, but after the camera cuts to the other side of the doorway the guards snap the swords shut again just behind him — and the guard standing to Mozart's rear-right is now holding his sword in his left hand.

Towards the end, when Salieri is speaking with Constanze, his hair repeatedly shifts from being swept back behind his head to hanging over his shoulder and then back again.

While Emperor Josef is seated and conversing with Mozart, a servant stands behind him holding a small silver jug just above his navel. A short while later the servant lowers the jug markedly, and his little finger is extended.

In the comic-opera sequence, a crew member becomes visible when the last of the small horses pops through the side wall. The person is wearing light‑coloured trousers and is standing behind the paper wall.

In the "ballet in Le Nozze di Figaro" sequence the wrong section of the opera is used: they stage the March, with unidentified dancers performing, sometimes with no musical accompaniment. It should actually be the second dance, the Fandango, performed by the opera’s characters, during which Susanna slips the Count the "bigliettino", luring him into the night-time trap of Act IV.

Mozart is depicted as being interred in a mass grave. This depiction is not accurate for the time. A "common grave" did not mean a communal burial pit, but an individual grave for ordinary people. By decree of Emperor Joseph II in 1784, common graves were left unmarked and could be reused after ten years. Consequently, when Constanze Mozart sought the grave seventeen years later, she was unable to locate it.

Don Giovanni was not Mozart's "blackest" opera. Far from being sombre, Mozart himself referred to it as an opera buffa, or comic opera, and there is no evidence that the Commendatore stands for his father Leopold.

A handful of mourners are depicted at the city gates during Mozart's burial. At that time in Vienna, the custom for ordinary burials was that no one attended the interment itself; people remained at the church following the funeral Mass. The earliest written accounts mentioning anyone present at the burial did not appear until sixty-five years later.

In the film, Salieri is shown pledging to God to remain celibate in return for becoming a celebrated composer and is depicted as living alone throughout; in reality, during the period portrayed he had both a wife and a son.

Don Giovanni was first staged in Prague rather than Vienna.

At the beginning of the film, Salieri bemoans that his own compositions have been forgotten while Mozart's remain familiar. In reality, by the 1820's — the period in which the scene is set — Mozart's music had largely fallen into neglect as well.

The film depicts snow and heavy rain at the moment of Mozart's death and interment, although contemporary Viennese newspapers recorded that the day was in actual fact dry and unseasonably warm.

The film suggests that Leopold Mozart was opposed to his son's marriage to Constanze Weber and was even openly antagonistic towards her. Mozart did encounter difficulty in obtaining his father's consent, but Leopold ultimately relented, his letter of approval arriving the day after Mozart married Constanze.

When Salieri speaks of La nozze di Figaro, he declares "I saw the woman... hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years". In reality, though, the footage shows the opera’s closing moment — "Ah tutti contenti", literally the finale — in which the husband has already realised his mistakes and is apologising for his previous behaviour.

During the staging of "The Magic Flute", at the point when the Queen of the Night's aria is sung, the set depicts her arrival — a moment from an earlier scene, whereas the aria itself occurs much later in the opera.

One Don Giovanni scene suggests that Leporello, Don Giovanni's servant, shares his master's fate. In reality, Leporello survives and takes part in the final sextet alongside Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Zerlina, Don Ottavio and Masetto, which brings the opera to a close.

After Salieri's father died, his family began calling him "Francesco". Salieri and his father shared the same given name, Antonio. Francesco Salieri was his elder brother.

When Mozart speaks of the opera set in a harem, he refers to it as being set in "Turkey". In the 18th century the realm in question was known as the "Ottoman Empire", and it did not adopt the name "Turkey" until 1920.

Although uncommon, the use of the name "Turkey" to denote the Ottoman Empire can be traced back to at least the 14th century.

Schikaneder has Mozart perform the party theme in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, which the Viennese guests at the party readily recognise. Although Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart admired Bach’s work and was acquainted with it through his friendship with the composer’s son, Bach’s name and compositions would in fact have been largely unfamiliar in Vienna of the 1780s. Bach’s music fell out of favour with performers shortly after his death in 1750 and was not revived until Felix Mendelssohn championed and popularised it around 1830.

If Mozart did know of Bach and his output, then Mozart playing his music is not an anachronism; the audience’s reaction could simply be their approval of an excellent piece performed by a celebrated musician.

When asked to perform in the style of Handel, Mozart replies "I don't like him." He also describes Christoph Willibald Gluck as "boring." In reality, however, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart admired George Frideric Handel, frequently played and listened to his compositions, and even re-orchestrated several of Handel's works, including the "Messiah." Mozart was likewise appreciative of Gluck's music and composed a well-known set of variations on a theme from one of Gluck's operas (K. 455).

The episode is related as a flashback by Salieri, so his rendition of Mozart's words is not necessarily reliable.

This film is not a biopic; it is a work of historical fiction. Most of the story is relayed in flashback by Salieri, and so the caveat of an "unreliable narrator" applies — everything that takes place is seen from his subjective point of view.

At the start of the film, Salieri performs for the priest on an instrument that appears to be a harpsichord, yet the sound heard is that of a piano.

The instrument is actually a pianoforte, which both the Emperor and Mozart also play during their first meeting. The pianoforte served as an intermediary between the 18th-century harpsichord and the grand piano that came into prominence in the late 19th century.

Josef II bore the title of Holy Roman Emperor, not Emperor of Austria as Salieri asserts.

Whilst the formal adoption of the Emperor of Austria title was proclaimed in 1806 by Josef’s nephew Franz, the Habsburgs were frequently referred to as the Austrian Emperor prior to that year.

Several scenes show the use of stage smoke, which appears to have been produced with dry ice. Although dry ice was not developed until the 19th century, other methods of creating stage smoke are documented, for example at the Globe Theatre as early as the 16th century. It is plausible the production team chose dry ice for the effect to avoid soiling the sets with the noxious odours of "genuine" 18th-century stage smoke.

The film places Salieri in Mozart's Vienna flat and portrays him as contributing to the composer's death by overworking him on the Requiem. In fact, on the day Mozart died Antonio Salieri was several hundred miles away in Venice and had no part in Mozart's premature death.

The sequence is presented as a later recollection by a mentally unwell Salieri who asserts he killed Mozart; he is therefore an unreliable narrator and the scene is not intended as a literal account of historical events.

Far from composing as if 'taking dictation from God' with no revisions, Mozart worked in a painstaking fashion, repeatedly reworking his compositions until they met his exacting standards.

This assertion comes from Salieri, who is not of sound mind. His envy of Mozart's gifts leads him to exaggerate his own abilities, thereby fuelling his resentment towards God.