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The torrent of moral outrage unleashed upon Amadeus by the gatekeepers of ‘high culture’ — who found a celebrated director’s adaptation of an equally celebrated Broadway play unbearably vulgar — seems comical in today’s milieu of historical figures chucked onscreen willy-nilly to indulge in all manner of naughty antics. The film’s portrayal of Mozart as a giggling loon, locked in a lurid rivalry with Antonio Salieri, was taken by many as a personal attack on a pillar of WASPish cultural identity: the rarefied, snooty realm of classical music and its icons, now tarnished by the common touch.

Of course, even those outraged by the film’s ‘cheapening’ or ‘commercializing’ their beloved Mozart had to admit that Forman’s work was upholding the composer’s own tradition. Just as ancient historians might have purpled at the portrayals of classical figures on stage or in opera, the public spats over fictionalizations of history are as much a part of the show as the script itself. The roaring critical and commercial success of Amadeus was an early indicator of the public demand for films that could drag the stuffier echelons of ‘history’ or ‘culture’ into the public realm, in all their sweaty, salacious, undignified glory.

Mozart is a doubly appropriate subject for this process, not only because he made his living in a comparable fashion, but because he was truly, proudly, unsexily vulgar. Historical fiction has long been an excuse for sexy vulgarity — special mention to Helen Mirren’s turn in the Penthouse production of Caligula — but the spectacle of a venerated male composer wriggling and giggling like a schoolgirl was a shock to the cultural system. It was fitting for the historical Mozart — who was on the "Leck mich im Arsch"’ trend before it went mainstream — to burst out of stuffy, elitist myth through the same vehicle with which he came to it: a big, ridiculous, finely crafted melodrama with fantastic music and popular appeal.

The film freely presents itself as wandering between fact and fiction: narrated by Mozart’s rival Salieri (F Murray Abraham), as an old man stuck in a madhouse claiming that he murdered Mozart (Tom Hulce) over thirty years earlier, the film emphases the fallibility of memory, but also embraces it. And despite being a broad-strokes representation of compelling human experiences — ambition, envy, genius, lust — it gets a surprising amount right, building on the secure premise of Mozart’s being both a wonderful composer and a massive weirdo.

Mozart’s music is as much the main character of the story as he, with its timeless, transcendental appeal attached to his crass, obscenely human personality. Forman and writer Peter Shaffer bash the audience around the head with a sensory experience cudgel — the crazed Mozart giggle, lavish period costume and pyrotechnics, and the obligatory dose of death and nudity — to convey the breadth and universality of human experience found in Mozart’s output, which ensured its preservation.

Told with a loaded agenda by a 19th-century character, brought to life by a late 20th-century writer and director aiming at the broadest of contemporary audiences, Amadeus simultaneously comments on and contributes towards the ‘nature’ of its subject, and the wider obsession of “all the mediocrities in the world” with pulling ‘extraordinary’ figures off their historical pedestals.

Aine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.