Salieri in Amadeus

[Alex K]

I remember these parts, but not the actual involvement of Salieri, other than being falsely protrayed as commissioning the requiem.

What I wanted to point out is the distinction, some of our contemporaries make, between pop and high culture. Many of the composers of days gone by have been pop artists, since they adressed the people and not some lofty assembly in most of the cases.

And, seriously, listening to most of Mozart, I find it absolutely obvious. Even J.S. Bach, whom I revere even more than Mozart, and who in our eyes always has this serious aura of pious Protestantism, was no stranger to entertaining the coffee house crowd for extra cash. He famously wrote cantatas for special occasions there addressing pressing (and surely to him personal) issues such as coffee addiction

That being said, the "pop music" of the likes of Mozart or even Bach, when he wrote for light entertainment, has involved an incomparably sophisticated range of musical expression - in the structure of the pieces, which take musical themes and vary and develop them ad infinitum, combining several musical lines and subtle changes in harmonies, to an extent that is not usually encountered in pop music. Contemporary pop music sometimes takes up some of those elements but remains, arguably, technically much much simpler on average. Whether that justifies scoffing at current pop music by default while adoring all the old stuff, is another question.