If you haven’t seen the movie Amadeus, stop putting it off and go see it!

The movie stretched the facts a bit in order to craft a good drama; you can read about that by googling it. However, there were two things in the movie that were spot-on: first, Mozart was a dirty man who was obsessed with poop; second, his insane genius for composition. Even his farts sound as good, if not better, than the average classical symphony.

One of his most famous operas, Don Giovanni, opens with an equally famous overture. The music is out-of-this-world (standard for Mozart), but even more impressive is the fact that he wrote it 24 hours before the opera’s first performance. Legend says that he woke up drunk on the day of the premiere, rolled out of bed and wrote the piece. It’s more likely that he wrote it the day before. Still, that’s not exactly timely, especially in light of the fact that, in 1787, after writing a piece, the score was sent to a copyist who would have to hand-write the individual parts for the musicians to play – and even then there’s the not-so-small matter of the musicians rehearsing …

So the next time someone tells you not to procrastinate, remind them that one of the greatest pieces of music ever was a drunken last-minute quickie written by a potty-mouth.