Falco ranked his ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ music video above the Oscar-winning movie ‘Amadeus’

Posted On February 8, 2026February 8, 2026

After Miloš Forman’s fanciful Mozart biopic Amadeus won the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar at the 1985 Academy Awards, the producers of the film hoped to send it on a victory lap back through the world’s cinemas. The trouble was, they weren’t sure how to get young people engaged and excited about an 18th-century period piece.

The solution, which was basically the solution to everything in 1985, was to use MTV. More specifically, somebody in the offices at Orion Studios was tasked with clipping together scenes from Amadeus and combining them with selections of actual Mozart compositions to create a modern music video suited to the short attention span of the average MTV viewer.

Turns out, that was a really bad idea. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, despite being the original punk of popular music, wasn’t going over big with the kids of the ‘80s, even with big Hollywood set pieces propping him up. When you had Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson writhing around and grabbing their crotches, it was hard for anyone to compete. The promotional Amadeus video came and went with a whisper.

But then, roughly a year later, something unexpected happened. There was a new video climbing the charts on MTV, starring a very peculiar but magnetic Austrian chap named Falco, who dressed like James Bond in one scene and a punk rock Mozart in another. His ridiculous but infectious Europop anthem, titled ‘Rock Me Amadeus’, could have just been another weird novelty hit in the golden era of weird novelty hits, but unlike most of the colourful eye candy on the MTV airwaves, this song featured a man rapping in German while wearing a ruffled shirt. And yet…he looked cool?

“The German language is very throaty and has never been suitable for pop music or most singing,” Falco told the Toronto Star at the time. “Rap allows me to actually incorporate the language into music, something nobody’s been able to do.”

Falco, born Johann Hölzel, had already been a big star in Europe for several years, but with ‘Rock Me Amadeus’, he became the envy of the Europop scene; the guy who managed to break America without even having to compromise his style or his language. The synth-driven dance single, which was remixed dozens of times, soon reached number one in at least nine different countries, including the UK and the US, making it one of the most memorable hits of 1986.

As a native of Vienna himself, Falco had a lifelong connection to Mozart already and an admiration for his rebellious spirit. He acknowledged, however, that ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ had been directly inspired by seeing Miloš Forman’s film, and that he’d even spoken to the acclaimed director before opting to make his own music video with the Austrian team of Rudolf Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher.

“In the end I think he was jealous,” the notoriously cocky Falco said, speaking of Forman, “Because what I did with a $60,000 video he couldn’t do with a multi-million-dollar film.”

It’s admittedly a bit of a weird flex for Falco to have made, considering Forman did well enough with his Hollywood film to get an Oscar out of it. But he might have meant that ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ did more with less, or that it captured more of the intended punk spirit of the original Amadeus stage play, written by Peter Shaffer in 1979. As good as the American actor Tom Hulce was in the lead role in Forman’s movie, it’s also easy to imagine Falco—an actual Viennese musical superstar—knocking that role out of the park.

Falco, predictably, never matched the success of ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ again with international audiences. He was preparing for a big comeback in 1998 when he was involved in an auto accident in the Dominican Republic and died from his injuries. He was only 40.

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