Guest Review: "Amadeus", by Peter Shaffer · 6:18am May 2nd, 2014
[Editor’s Note: I found this review crumpled up in the author’s wastebasket. I do not know why she discarded it, unless perhaps she did not wish to provoke her readers with an unpopular opinion. But this is nonsense, for I know you will treat it fairly. As for myself, I may not agree with her conclusions, but I think the power of her arguments more than makes up for it. Do forgive the occasional error that crept into this first and only draft, for I truly didn’t want to disturb anything through my crude edits.]
Amadeus was a 1984 film, directed by Milos Forman and written by Peter Shaffer. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham as Salieri), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Shaffer). It did similarly well with BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. At its peak, it was the #6 film in America.
Yet, despite critical and popular acclaim, I believe the film to be profoundly flawed, focused as it is on the character assassination of a perfectly decent composer. This should not be a surprise, considering who wrote it. Peter Shaffer’s prior work before Amadeus was an unspeakably vile and disgusting work, which I will not even do the dignity of naming.
[Editor’s Note: The work being referred to is Equus (1977). Don’t look it up, or you’ll regret it. I’m serious—if you have any admiration for horses whatsoever, you will regret even glancing at the plot synopsis.]
The subject of this particular hatchet job of Shaffer’s, despite the title, is not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but Antonio Salieri, a respectable Italian composer of the late Eighteenth Century, who had regrettably fallen into an undeserved obscurity after his death. Unlike the musical idiot portrayed in the film, Salieri was a genuine innovator in the realm of opera, responsible for the blending of the disparate styles of serious and comic opera into a single form able to handle the range from farce to tragedy in a single work, to combine poetry and music in a form that anticipated the work of Richard Wagner a century later. His works were successful not only in his home of Vienna, but also Milan and Paris. Many of Salieri’s innovations were adopted by Mozart in his operas, with open acknowledgement of his debt to the elder composer.
Ah yes, Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man that Salieri claims to have murdered in this film. In truth, the two men were the best of friends, and there exists voluminous correspondence between the two men attesting to this fact. Ah, but Peter Shaffer would not let a simple matter like the truth stand in his way—instead, he claims that Salieri was only pretending to be Mozart’s friend in order to be best positioned to secretly betray him. It is a very unjust tactic of Shaffer, to try to use kindness to prove cruelty. And then the specific means of this murder: working Mozart to death by commissioning him in secret to compose his Requiem. As a matter of fact, the Requiem was not commissioned by Salieri, in secret or in person, but rather by a mad nobleman who schemed to steal credit for the work once it was complete. So in other words, Salieri’s plan, except without intending to use it to kill Mozart.
So, let’s split this 160 minute movie (180 minutes in the “Director’s Cut”) into a five act structure, and lay out precisely how the screenwriter systematically destroyed the reputation of a fundamentally good man.
Act I
The movie begins with the elderly Salieri in 1825 being committed to an insane asylum after a failed suicide attempt. A priest, Father Vogel, visits the old man to obtain his confession of what led him to do what he did.
Flash back to Salieri’s childhood in a small village in Italy, narrated (as much of the film will be) by Old Salieri. Here we see the boy make a bargain with God, a bargain that is the heart of the whole movie.
You see, there is an unstated conflict here, between Salieri’s view of God and the evidence of God’s actual nature, as represented through the life of Mozart. (Please forgive this pony if she manages to misread a human belief system in the following argument.) Salieri’s view, which Shaffer’s screenplay roundly condemns, appears reasonable but is ultimately a straw man, a view that no devout Christian actually holds. This is the view of a two-dimensional merchant, one who sees all of life as a series of bargains, including bargains with the Almighty. In this view, one can obtain anything in life if you present a suitable proposal in the form of prayer. This view in the movie is emphasized with near-identical images of the crucified Jesus appearing on walls from a Legnano church to Salieri’s comfortable Vienna home, representing the fundamental bargain of the Savior’s death for your own personal salvation, although presented in such crass exact terms that one would think that the weights on the celestial balance were both finite: that His death on the cross could only redeem so many souls, and when that weight of dead Christians was reached, then the gates of Heaven would close with a mighty crash and anyone who died afterwards would be eternally damned regardless of their virtues.
So it is with the boy Salieri’s bargain: in return for fame in his lifetime and everlasting fame after his death, Salieri promises to present his compositions as God’s inspirations, and to be a chaste and good little boy for the rest of his days. He believes that God has honored this bargain by arranging the accidental death of Salieri’s cruel father, who stood between him and a career in music, and by a meteoric rise that led him to become Music Master for the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II by the age of 38. We have now reached the decade of the 1780’s, where most of the film will be set.
The flaw in this view of course, is to assume that one can force God to act predictably, and that He actually favors strict ascetic lifestyles. A cursory reading of the Bible will quickly show that neither of these assumptions were ever true. And so to use the fact that a crude egotist like Mozart was the true repository of God’s musical genius in no way justifies Salieri’s mental breakdown and eventual revenge scheme.
Act I ends with Salieri’s Welcome March to Mozart, which the young genius effortlessly morphs into “Non Piu Andrai”, his famous march from The Marriage of Figaro.
Act II
The film presents several false dichotomies at this point, as all of the main characters are introduced. Emperor Joseph II is a musical simpleton, proved by his like for the music of Music Master Salieri. Kappelmeister Bonno, Count Orsini-Rosenberg and, to a lesser extent, the Baron Van Swieten form a Greek Chorus of advisors trying to keep the History of Music at a standstill, which is repeatedly equated to keeping that music Italian in inspiration and language instead of German. This ignores the reality that the Holy Roman Empire was a polyglot state that could only exist via a careful balancing between several conflicting cultures. Of course the film reduces this complex issue down pretty obviously by having all of the German-language works performed in English translation, while the Italian works are left in their own language, bereft even of English subtitles.
Next we have the notion that the aristocracy refuse to let music “progress”, while the public is in favor of it. This is complete and errant nonsense that the film itself contradicts, in its attempt to have its cake and eat it, too: it is stated in passing that Salieri’s music was popular for decades after the death of Mozart, that Salieri was in fact the most popular composer in all of Europe, and that it was only in Salieri’s old age that Mozart’s popularity reached critical mass. This would strongly imply that the only way that Mozart was ever going to get his innovative music paid for was if he had a sponsor to pay for it, and in that day and age that meant an aristocrat.
And yet the aristocrats in the film are shown as sheep, blindly following the opinions of their Emperor without ever questioning them. In the film, his favor briefly favors Mozart, before being easily swayed by Salieri.
So in the presence of contradictory testimony, we are left with the conflicting evidence of fame. The audience coming into the film know the name of Mozart, and know his melodies, in many cases being first exposed to them within days of being born. While Salieri is of course completely unknown.
It’s really an unfair situation. The musical world that developed after both composer’s deaths happened to favor Mozart’s themes and ideas over Salieri’s, for reasons that had nothing to do with either man. I mean, imagine that the Holy Roman Empire was led by two emperors instead of one, to match that double-headed eagle they used as their symbol. Let’s say that one of these emperors had duties centered around war, and the other was devoted to peace. If at some point the efforts of the two emperors succeeded in creating a lasting peace, then over the following generations, peace would be seen to be more and more superior to war. The memory of war would be corrupted, making the character of the last emperor who had been forced to actually wage war more and more abhorrent. This would have happened regardless of how successful this War Emperor might have been at winning bloodless victories over her foes. And so it’s the elder brother, the Emperor of Peace, that would get all of the fame, all of the love. And wouldn’t you get a little bit jealous, at seeing that emperor able to meet with potential adversaries both calm and belligerent, and always knowing what to say, her speeches being written in a single draft without corrections, like they were dictated by the Creator? Wouldn’t you?
So it comes to this: Mozart’s supply of musical genius is inexhaustible, while Salieri suddenly discovers how worthless his ability is in comparison. And yet Salieri had kept by his “bargain”, while Mozart had done everything to violate it. What other choice was there, but to declare war on God Himself? A war with the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the battlefield.
Act III
This act covers the lesser intrigues of Salieri against Mozart, as he prevents his secret rival from getting any of the private teaching jobs that would keep him from going broke. He plants a servant in his household, and in this way learns that he is working on The Marriage of Figaro, based on a banned play, and including a banned ballet. Mozart succeeds beyond all expectations in getting the opera performed exactly as he wrote it, but is doomed by the fact that the work goes completely over the Emperor’s head. This is contrasted with the success of Salieri’s opera Axus: King of Ormus, which Mozart finds a way to praise to an eager Salieri in the most back-hoofed way possible. Even when Salieri is at the height of his fame, he finds himself brought down by the knowledge that Mozart is better, that he is more beloved by God, that nothing she does will ever be given the credit it deserves. Indeed, her best acts will be erroneously assigned to the wrong sister, again and again. What is one to do under these circumstances? What is the Emperor of War to do in a time of eternal peace, except declare war on his own unworthy, undeserving people?
And then we complicate matters with daddy issues. Mozart’s father Leopold comes to live with Mozart and his wife Constanze, leading to constant fights as Leopold finds his son and especially his daughter-in-law to be unworthy. Salieri observes a fight between Mozart and Leopold, and in this way learns the control that the father has over the son. The act ends with the news of the father’s death.
Act IV
Salieri attends the premiere of Mozart’s next, and darkest opera, Don Giovanni, and immediately recognizes the secret meaning of the work: the sinner Don Giovanni is meant to be Mozart, and the statue of the Commendatore that comes to life in the final act is Leopold Mozart, condemning his son from beyond the grave. From this, Salieri devises his grand plan to destroy his rival.
And let us take some time to examine this plan. Salieri will dress up in the all-concealing costume that he saw Leopold Mozart wear during the fight with his son, and will commission Mozart anonymously to write a Mass for the Dead, for “a man who deserved a Requiem Mass and never got one.” The original plan was that Salieri would somehow murder Mozart after he had written the piece, then premiere it as his own work and thereby achieve immortality, thumbing his nose at God at last. Instead, the plan works even better than Salieri hoped: the composition of the Requiem itself kills Mozart, as he gains the fatalistic belief that the work is meant for and will inevitably cause his own funeral.
What we have here is a death wish. Almost everypony exhibits these at some point in their lives, at least if they have anything close to a realistic outlook on life. Most ponies are able to deal with these drives. But here we have a golden opportunity, a chance to nudge such a drive into a full-blown monomania, an ever-growing drive towards utter self-destruction. It is a wicked, evil, horrible plan, to so use another’s twisted relationship with one’s own father as a means to destroy an otherwise perfect being.
I wonder if it could have worked?
In the movie, we see Mozart waver, between the self-destructive Requiem, and the life-affirming opera The Magic Flute. Constanze wrongly sides with the Requiem, as she sees the corrosive money that funds it, while The Magic Flute is sustained entirely by the promises of a(nother) massive egotist, the promoter and star Schikaneder. Unwilling to believe her husband’s tales about the supernatural curse he believes the Requiem has over him, Constanze leaves for a mini-vacation with their small boy.
And Salieri moves in for the kill.
Act V
Learning about the opera, Salieri visits Mozart in disguise once more, to encourage him to continue throwing his life at the Requiem. At the premiere of The Magic Flute, Salieri sees this act pay dividends, as Mozart collapses mid-performance.
Pretending to be his friend, Salieri whisks Mozart back to his home. When Schikaneder arrives at the apartment with Mozart’s share of the opera’s profits, Salieri takes the money and lies to Mozart, claiming that the visitor was the Requiem’s sponsor, with enough money to live on, if he finishes the work by an impossible deadline. He then volunteers to assist the clearly dying man, in this way experiencing for the first and last time the composer’s genius first-hand, and ensuring that nobody comes between Mozart and the death he has chosen for himself. The ensuing sequence about the composition of the Confutatis is justly celebrated as one of the best uses of Classical music in film.
Constanze, urged on by a feeling of dread, rushes back to her husband’s side, but it is too late: the night of composition has killed him. Before she learns this fact, she locks away the Requiem’s manuscript and kicks Salieri out, thereby denying him his goal of stealing the work for his own. Continuing his theme of petty jealousy of God, Salieri claims that the Creator was the one to kill Mozart as He did, for no other reason but to deny Salieri the chance to claim a truly great work as his own.
And so ends the confession of the elderly Salieri. Put in his wheelchair, he is rolled out past the other inmates of the asylum, declaring himself the patron saint of mediocrities, and unlike God, forgiving every one of them.
This is in my mind a most cruel way to end the film. Even within the scope of what we are presented, it is quite possible to conclude that Mozart’s death was pretty much inevitable from the moment of Leopold’s death, and that Salieri had no major effect one way or another. This means that he is just grabbing the thoroughly useless title of “Patron Saint of Mediocrity” purely as an ego boost. To turn to my earlier example, it would be like the Emperor of War, after being forgiven for trying to bring Eternal War to the Holy Roman Empire, had resigned himself to being the “Lord of Petty Bickering”. Well, once he had learned to forgive himself for an unforgivable crime paid for through an extremely-lengthy prison sentence and the boundless forgiveness of that pastel-colored Emperor of Peace.
I can envision a much more satisfying ending, if you’ll indulge me. The key is recognizing that even if the area of your genius is forever closed off from the world, that you can always find a way to make it work. Salieri, the real Salieri, not the caricature of the film, did quite well for himself even after deciding that the music of the Nineteenth Century was not to his taste. He taught vocal composition, the subject of his genius, to Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Liszt, composers who took his innovations in completely new directions.
And as for the Emperor of War? Well during his imprisonment he found that those who still followed his dream were those abandoned by normal society, the homeless, the wanderers of the night, and those who felt themselves compelled to take up a life of crime due to their extreme circumstances. If the Emperor of Peace would not look upon them, who else would, but the rehabilitated Emperor of War? And if there should be discovered a New World across the sea, a world condemned sight unseen by ponies as a world of darkness and ignorance, a world of crime and corruption, could there be no better, more welcoming place in existence for the one who in her ignorance and pain tried to proclaim an Eternal reign of her own?
...Ah, who am I fooling?
Jesus frikking Christ, this review made me uncomfortable in oh so many ways...I suppose I should be grateful I haven't actually seen Amadeus, but I'm going to have to come back here later after I've organized my thoughts in order to speak up
Not me, you haven't fooled me. Certainty an interesting insight into Twilight's brain, seems like she is still a bit bitter about Luna leaving.
Nice.
I believe the subtext here is rapidly becoming, uh, text.
Really nice choice of review material both for parallels and analysis.
I think you mean this as criticism of the movie, when it could be read as praise of the movie. Salieri isn't necessarily supposed to be right. Perhaps his conception of God is his tragic flaw. Or perhaps his conception of God is fair--for that WAS closer to how most people thought of God at the time than taking the Bible seriously--and it is 18th century Europe, not Salieri, who has the flaw, making it more of a modernist tragedy.
The movie is unjust to both Salieri and Mozart, but it's still a great story. You could have instead told a story in which history's choice between Mozart & Salieri was arbitrary, and focused on that unfairness, but it would be a completely different story. Which you could write, you know, instead of griping about this one. This comes across to me more as griping than as criticism, because you aren't saying the story was done badly so much as you are saying that you don't like what the writer decided to do.
2070444
bad horse, no.
this is written from the perspective of Luna, as are most of his 'editor' things.
so of COURSE she found the story despicable, because the true story felt familiar. Seriously, re-read that last paragraph- it's DIRECTLY about his 'verse about a link between human and pony worlds, whose name escapes me at the moment. 'a world dismissed out of hand'? a 'brother of war' and an 'ivory faced' 'brother of peace' who forgives the brother of war? Hell, the writer periodically slips up and says 'she' instead of 'he' and 'her' instead of 'his'.
2083054 I wondered about the asides in italics, and why the Emperor of Peace was pastel-colored.
2083450
XD, context is often important, no?
2084045 As is reading an entire post before responding.
It's obvious in retrospect, and I got that McPoodle was using a persona, and that there were parallels being made with Celestia & Luna, but I just said "meh, inscrutable author is inscrutable" and forged ahead.
Now I must take back all the condescending thoughts I've had when people miss the obvious in my stories.
2084107
MWAHAHA, FEEL THE WRATH OF SHAME
I'm sorry, I've no idea what came over me just then...