When I was a kid taking in the Saturday matinees (double feature, newsreel, cartoon, previews of coming attractions, and the thirteen chapter serial—"The Masked Marvel," "The Mysterious Dr. Satan"), I saw a lot of Hollywood-style bio-pics such as "A Song to Remember" (Cornel Wilde as Chopin, Jose Iturbi doing the piano playing), "Song of Scheherazade" (Jean-Pierre Aumont as Rimsky-Korsakov), and the excellent "Tonight We Sing" with David Wayne as impresario Sol Hurok, with all sorts of great people playing earlier performers, such as Ezio Pinza as Russian basso Fyodor Chaliapin and Tamara Toumanova as Anna Pavlova).

I was exposed to some really great music when I was in my early teens, but it didn't take me long to figure out that, as entertaining as they were, these movies could hardly be relied on as authoritative biographies of the people being depicted.

I brought that early-learned awareness to "Amadeus," and indeed read up a bit on the lives of Mozart and Salieri before I saw the movie. So, although the movie was quite entertaining, I was aware that any similarity between what I saw on the screen and actual historical fact was purely coincidental.

Among my other studies at the U. of W. School of Music and Cornish was music history, which included much about the composers.

Apparently, when Johnny Ace was doing his thing, I was busily practicing my first guitar chords and learning songs out of A Treasury of Folk Songs by John and Sylvia Kolb and The American Songbag by Carl Sandburg, and from the records of Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Susan Reed, and Cynthia Gooding.

You've heard of them, josepp?

Don Firth