Amadeus Amadeus Amadeus is a play by Peter Shaffer, which gives a highly fictionalized account of the lives of the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. First performed in 1979, "Amadeus" was inspired by a short 1830 play by Alexander Pushkin called "Mozart and Salieri" (which was also used as the libretto for an opera of the same name by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1897). In the play, significant use is made of the music of Mozart, Salieri and other composers of the period. The premieres of Mozart's operas "The Abduction from the Seraglio", "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni", and
Seraglio Seraglio A seraglio ( or ) or serail is the sequestered living quarters used by wives and concubines in an Ottoman household. The term "harem" is a generic term for domestic spaces reserved for women in a Muslim family, which can also refer to the women themselves. The Ottoman imperial harem was known in Ottoman Turkish as "Harem-i Hümâyûn". The etymology of this Italian word is unclear. The Italian Treccani dictionary gives two derivations: one from Turkish "saray", from Persian "sarai" (), meaning "palace", or the enclosed courts for the wives and concubines of the harem of a house or