Directed by Milos Forman
Starring F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce
reviewed by John Murphy
Beloved of God
Amadeus nabbed an impressive 8 Academy Awards in 1984, including Best Picture and Best Director for Milos Forman. All awards were well-deserved. Rarely does a movie come along this bursting with life, wit, and energy.
For viewers who think opera is all about shrill-shrieking sopranos in body armor and pigtails, Amadeus makes a great introduction to the life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the towering genius of classical music. As portrayed in this imaginative biopic, Mozart was more of a rock star than a stuffy old composer: rebellious, egotistical, childish, brilliant, and bored with the staid conventions of state-sponsored opera (featuring Grecian characters “so lofty they sound as if they shit marble,” as he so memorably puts it).
Though Mozart makes a delightfully paradoxical protagonist — an infantile genius played to the hilt by a deliriously brilliant Tom Hulce — Amadeus’ most memorable character is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), Herr Mozart’s rival composer in the Austrian court of Emperor Joseph II (portrayed with dry hilarity by Jeffrey Jones). Vienna, the City of Music, is the seat of an emperor known in his time as “the Musical King” because of his passion for opera. “Actually,” corrects Salieri, “the man had no ear at all. But what did it matter? He adored my music.”
Into Salieri’s self-satisfied sphere steps the musical prodigy, Mozart, who had been the envy of Salieri’s obscure youth: “This man had written his first concerto at the age of four, his first symphony at seven, a full-scale opera at twelve.” Salieri, eager to meet the Infant Phenomenon, wonders as he wanders the court, seeking Mozart: “Did it show? Is talent like that written on the face?”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man whose very name, ‘Amadeus,’ translates into ‘Beloved of God,’ turns out to be a spoiled, infantile, vulgar little man of little virtue and even less manners; a “giggling, dirty-minded creature” in Salieri’s estimation. This encounter with Genius precipitates in our narrator an existential crisis; how to reconcile Mozart’s heavenly music — “the Voice of God” is how Salieri describes it — with a vain, petulant, puerile creature.
Salieri possesses just enough musical talent to appreciate Mozart’s incomparable genius. He worships Mozart’s gift for music “finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” His face appears transfixed, as if in religious ecstasy, when he sight-reads the miraculously pure sheets of Mozart’s first-drafted music. Salieri burns with the desire, like a “lust” he calls it, to write music such as this, but he can only recognize the talent in another. Yet “why would God choose an obscene child as His instrument?”
This is Salieri’s existential question, the central question of the play and film, and part of the enduring mystery of Mozart, and the enduring mystery of inexplicable genius. If Salieri’s dilemma wasn’t to some degree universal, the film would be less successful than it is. As written, the audience confronts with Salieri God’s apparent caprice when it comes to dispensing talent. Who hasn’t drunk from the bitter cup of envy? In God’s grand scheme of things, only a few lights ever burn as bright as Mozart’s. Imagine all the other painters and sculptors in Michelangelo’s Rome diminished by comparison. Imagine the other filmmakers who stood by while 24-year old Orson Welles released Citizen Kane. Imagine the would-be novelists who read Joseph Conrad (for whom English was a third language) and gave up writing on the spot. “All I ever wanted,” Salieri says, “was to sing to God. He gave me that longing, and then made me mute� Why? Tell me that.” The priest has no answer.
But because it’s such a good question, Salieri belongs to that strange celestial of fallen angels, ranking alongside Milton’s Lucifer, Kubrick’s HAL 9000, and Shakespeare’s Iago as one of the all-time great villains. Like “honest” Iago, the devilish sociopath in Othello, Salieri is a clever, devious man bent on destruction. Because he could never create a work of art to rival Mozart, he chooses to destroy “God’s instrument.”
The difference may be that Iago was something of a creative genius, a kind of puppet master controlling the people around him like marionettes. Salieri, on the other hand, dubs himself the “Patron Saint of Mediocrities.” The script by Peter Shaffer, adapted from his own play, invents a truly fascinating and original bad guy. Abraham does the part justice with a rich, multilayered performance (though I confess I’d love to have seen the great Ian Mckellen incarnate the role on stage). Salieri is by turns preening, bitter, sardonic, and nihilistic, and Abraham covers those bases with apparent ease. Never has sheer mediocrity been so compelling.
Czech director Milos Forman, who also helmed the devastating classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest, seems drawn to stories about vigorous, vital eccentrics (whether McMurphy or Mozart) undone by bitterness and resentment. He orchestrates the elements of Amadeus masterfully. The movie is a harmonious marriage of sight and sound, Mozartian in its effortless wit, grand passions, and lyrical beauty. Certain passages of the film play like big-budgeted Mozart music videos, and I mean that as a compliment. The film is visually and aurally ravishing; “operatic” in the best sense: powerful, epic, and writ large.
Salieri would seethe with jealousy.
