Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), a child prodigy groomed by his father, toured the courts of Europe, impressing everyone with his precocious performing and composing talents. A composer of the Classical period, his work—symphonic, chamber, piano, operatic and choral—is popular and widely acknowledged as a pinnacle of music, and even of human creative achievement. He was not as popular or successful in his lifetime as he has been posthumously. Mozart went by many different names in his lifetime. This resulted partly from the church traditions of the day and partly from the fact that Mozart was multilingual and freely adapted his name to other languages. His baptismal record gives his name as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He normally went by a form of Wolfgang. Theophilus was the name of his godfather, and is the Greek for "Loved by God," which would be Amadeus in Latin. Mozart and others used this only rarely, occasionally using the French Amedé or German Gottlieb.

Antonio Salieri

Mozart lived during a transitional period for musicians. Socially, musicians went from composing for a patron—a nobleman or the Church—to composing for a general audience. They went from creating music for special occasions to writing music for public concerts or opera performances, from being a member of the court to being a free agent seeking to appeal to the middle class. Salieri fit quite successfully into the old system, while Mozart was caught in the transition.

Stories of his complicity in Mozart's early death began circulating around the time of Salieri's own death. Within a few years, Pushkin wrote a short verse play, Mozart and Salieri, that put forth the idea that Salieri poisoned Mozart., and in 1879 Rimsky-Korsakov wrote an opera based on Pushkin's play, but this notion has been discounted by scholars. Some scholars suggest that Salieri may have been slandered as a victim of the intense rivalry between the Italian and German schools of opera. Others argue that he makes a convenient scapegoat to explain the now unfathomable inability of Mozart's contemporaries to appreciate his genius.

There has been some controversy over playwright Shaffer's depiction of Mozart's coarse language and infantile actions, as well as his depiction of Salieri's desire to kill Mozart. Although Shaffer admittedly uses dramatic license, much of the story and characterization is historically accurate. Some of the scatological language is taken almost verbatim from Mozart's letters. While Salieri and Mozart worked together on numerous occasions, there may have been antipathy or rivalry between them. In some letters Mozart blames "Salieri's cabal" for the limited success of his work.

– Contributed by the CST Education Department