Mozart, who died poor, was ever a fallible self-promoter. His actual life, his actual music, while not unappealing, mainly interested a cultivated elite. It took Peter Shaffer, two centuries later, to make Mozart irresistible to millions of classical-music novices. Shaffer's efficacious popularization strategy is two-faceted. First, he simplifies the subject matter. Compared to Mozart's original life, with all its messy detail, Shaffer's version, in his play Amadeus, is taut, schematic, marvelously theatrical. Compared to Mozart's symphonies and concertos, with their abstract content, Shaffer's samplings of such works as the B-flat wind serenade, the D-minor piano concerto, and the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola-all of which figure in the Amadeus film directed by Milos Forman-are decked out in visual imagery so attractive and informative we know exactly what to think and feel. A peerless confectioner, Shaffer makes even the pain of Mozart's penury or the stridence of his Dies Irae go down as easily as cough medicine in sweet syrup. The second facet of Shaffer's popularization technique is the wrapping on the candy: it is itself a magnificent-production, elaborate yet unmistakably tasteful. That is to say, unlike Hollywood's greatcomposer popularizations, Amadeus conspicuously aspires to the pretensions of high art. Utterly rejecting the careless vulgarity of A Song to Remember (with Cornel Wilde as Chopin) or Song of Love (with Paul Henreid as Schumann and Robert Walker as Brahms), Shaffer and Forman insist on sophisticated acting and production values; ever conscious of Amadeus's meaningfulness, they are not opportunistic but sincere. Their pleasure in celebrating the timeless and great is palpable, even explicit. The higher the pedestal, the more they enjoy gazing aloft. This potent hybridization of mass appeal and snob appeal is what Dwight Macdonald, in a landmark 1960 essay, called midcult.l Midcult possesses the essential qualities of mass culture--the formula, the built-in reaction-but decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. It pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it