Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus premiered in 1979 in London and won immediate acclaim. It was inspired by a much earlier drama, a verse tragedy written in 1830 by the Russian wunderkind Alexander Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri. Here is Pushkin’s Salieri, the court composer who sees himself surpassed by young Mozart, expressing the reason for his envy and enmity: “Where, where is rightness? when the sacred gift, / Immortal genius, comes not in reward / For fervent love, for total self-rejection, / For work and for exertion and for prayers, / But casts its light upon a madman’s head, / An idle loafer’s brow … O Mozart, Mozart!” In truth, the real Mozart was no idle loafer, and historians have found no reason to think Salieri poisoned him or even hated him. But for parsing the unfairness in nature’s dispersal of gifts, what a marvelous construction—a play that floats upon the most unearthly passages in Mozart’s music. The film came five years later, in 1984, directed by Miloš Forman. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and, of course, Best Sound. If you haven’t seen the film lately, or ever, head to the Hollywood Bowl, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Pacific Chorale will perform the eternal music live while the movie screens. Norman Huynh conducts. —Laura Jacobs