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
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his family had moved from central Vienna to the suburb of Alsergrund. Although it has been suggested that Mozart's aim was to reduce his rental expenses, research shows that by moving to the suburb, Mozart had not in fact reduced his expenses (as claimed in his letter to Puchberg), but merely increased the housing space at his disposal. Mozart began to borrow money, most often from his friend and fellow Mason Michael Puchberg; "a pitiful sequence of letters pleading for loans" survives. Maynard Solomon and others have suggested that Mozart was suffering from depression, and it seems that his