Miloš Forman (1984)
Amadeus was Peter Shaffer’s big one, for several reasons. As usual, his two protagonists represent conscientious order versus intractable otherness – the conventionally civilised character struggles to control an opponent whose culture or natural aptitude is beyond him. In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, it’s the Spanish conquistador Pizarro pitted against the Inca king Atahualpa; in Equus, the professional expertise of an emotionally desiccated psychiatrist takes on a teenage patient’s aberrant but ecstatic allegiance to a horse god. So why is Amadeus the big one for Shaffer? In Miloš Forman’s film version at least, because of the lavish period setting, late-eighteenth-century Vienna (though with Prague standing in). On screen or stage, because the context of the contest involves high art: the adversaries are Antonio Salieri, court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Mozart. Although Shaffer plays fast and loose with the true history (or what’s broadly accepted as the true history) of this pair’s relationship, the enterprise is helped by an historical fact invaluable to his purpose – the middle name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
That name introduces a third reason why Amadeus stands out from Shaffer’s other work. Atahualpa, the horse-worshipper Alan Strang in Equus and Mozart are all inspired – or appear so to the men whose nemesis they will be. (Shaffer’s principals were always male until he wrote the more light-hearted Lettice and Lovage in the mid-1980s.) Whether or not a play’s spokesman for rationality is also a religious believer – Pizarro is, the psychiatrist Martin Dysart isn’t – that rationality is a limitation, but Amadeus takes things further. Shaffer’s Salieri writes music for the greater glory of God. It’s only when Mozart comes to town that he realises the mediocrity of his own work compared with the younger man’s. Wolfgang isn’t just, as his middle name suggests, ‘loved by God’: he writes sublime music with such facility that he might be taking dictation from the divine. At the same time, he’s personally contemptible – boastful, childish and lewd, a flagrantly undeserving recipient of God’s favour. The practising Christian Salieri is so appalled by this injustice that he has it in not only for Mozart but for God, too: the musical genius who may be God’s instrument is also Salieri’s means of getting his own back on God. In the film, after seething in public, Salieri lets rip in the privacy of his own home. Throwing his wooden crucifix into the fire, he ends a lengthy imprecation with a warning to the Almighty – ‘I will hinder and harm your creature on earth as far as I am able – I will ruin your incarnation!’
Back on general release in cinemas, Forman’s Amadeus, for which Peter Shaffer wrote the screenplay, begins with the elderly Salieri’s attempted suicide, after which he’s committed to a psychiatric hospital. Whereas all the other patients seen there are lying in or wandering about a corridor, Salieri (F Murray Abraham) has his own private room, complete with piano. A Catholic priest (Richard Frank) comes to hear his confession. Salieri, obsessed with the idea that he killed Mozart, is more than ready to shout his guilt from the rooftops so a confession might seem surplus to requirements but his interview with Father Vogler is the narrative’s framing device. Salieri recalls the events of more than thirty years ago, which are shown as flashbacks. Every so often, Forman cuts back to the hospital room to allow Salieri to reflect on the events just dramatised.
Forman’s modus operandi is clear from very early in the conversation between Salieri and Vogler. Salieri asks if the priest knows who he is. Vogler says no but that doesn’t matter because all men are equal in the eyes of God, a remark that prompts an emphatically meaningful look from Salieri, who then moves his wheelchair towards the piano. He plays a melody; the priest doesn’t recognise this or the next one that Salieri plays; the pianist explains he was once the most famous composer in Europe and wrote both pieces. Next, he plays the start of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Vogler’s eyes light up, he even hums along – ‘I didn’t know you wrote that!’ Marked pause before Salieri acidly replies, ‘I didn’t’. (You’d think Vogler’s seeming not to know that Mozart wrote it would be some consolation to Salieri but never mind …) This exchange takes an age to get through but things are even worse in the imperial palace flashbacks. Most of the actors deliver their supposedly humorous lines with excruciating deliberation, squeezing each syllable for the last drop of wit. The emperor himself (Jeffrey Jones) is relatively easy on the ear; among his courtiers, the worst offender, against stiff competition, is Count Orsini-Rosenberg (Charles Kay). These overdone cartoons of vanity and prejudice make the film itself ridiculous.
Then there’s Mozart (Tom Hulce). We’re introduced to him in a palace buffet room, where Salieri is getting himself a sneak preview and taste of the elaborate confectionery arrayed on a long, large table. (Amadeus won eight Oscars. If there’d been an award for best food, it would have been nine.) Enter Mozart and Constanze Weber (Elizabeth Berridge), his landlady’s daughter who will become his wife. They scrabble about on all fours under the tablecloth, pretending to be cat and mouse, although the first shot of Constanze is designed to foreground her partly exposed breasts so the effect isn’t very murine. Then ‘Wolfie’, as Constanze calls Mozart (to these ears, an unhelpful echo of the 1970s BBC sitcom Citizen Smith), launches into potty-mouthed verbal ingenuity. He jokes to Constanze that they’re in a place where people talk backwards, instructs her to ‘Sra-I’m-sick’ and ‘Tish-I’m-tee’. This, and much of what Mozart will say over the next two hours or more, is accompanied by a high-pitched whinny of a laugh. It’s meant to be infuriating, especially to Salieri, but it’s annoying chiefly because Tom Hulce is so obviously putting it on. (A put-on laugh can be annoying too, of course, but I doubt that Hulce’s is meant to sound false.)
When I saw the original National Theatre production of Amadeus in the early 1980s, the cat-and-mouse routine, performed by Simon Callow and Felicity Kendal, delivered one of the most gruesome bits of theatre I can remember and Callow throughout made Mozart immature in obvious, stagy ways. Remembering that as well as watching Hulce in the role made me wonder if Shaffer’s Mozart has ever been played by an actor who charges the character with the degree of ruttish menace that it surely needs. Shortly after that first encounter in the buffet room, Salieri discusses Mozart with the soprano Caterina Cavalieri (Christine Ebersole), who is Salieri’s protégée. Soon afterwards, she’s starring in Il Seraglio. Salieri watches from the audience and, as an old man, remembers bitterly his conviction that Mozart had got his hands on Caterina physically as well as operatically. Hulce’s interpretation, lacking any suggestion of carnal intent or undertow, makes this hard to credit.
Shaffer’s schema strangles at birth potentially more interesting aspects of the material. The complexity of Salieri’s mixed feelings to see his own, relatively uninspired work better received by the tin-eared emperor than much of Mozart’s. Mozart’s incomprehension of this and prideful certainty that his music is superlative – two sides of the same coin. There’s also both too much and too little madness in Amadeus. It’s Miloš Forman, rather than Shaffer, who is responsible for the surfeit. Reviewing Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), whose action takes place almost entirely within a mental institution, Pauline Kael, though she had plenty of praise for the film, was uneasy about what she described as the director’s penchant for ‘faces that don’t take the light – thick features and muddled stares …’. Although I don’t agree with Kael’s words in relation to the excellent Cuckoo’s Nest, they nearly anticipate Forman’s depiction of the hospital inmates in Amadeus. These graphic images of imbecility and infirmity are doubly offensive: even though the people supplying them are no more than a bunch of extras, Forman is eager to stress their grotesque appearance. Salieri is incongruous in this madhouse company, even though Peter Shaffer keeps changing his mind as to whether Salieri is out of his.
The audience must be meant to accept Salieri’s account of what happened decades back as accurate rather than deluded (in any case, the narrative includes plenty of sequences from which he’s absent). At the same time, Salieri’s declared antagonism to God seems a kind of deranged hubris. This is where there’s not enough madness – Salieri’s blasphemous quest isn’t extraordinary enough. As an old man, he puts to the priest the rhetorical question, ‘What use after all is Man, if not to teach God His lessons?’ though he ends up telling Vogler that it was God, not him, who killed Mozart, and that God is indifferent to those He loves as well as those He despises (a bleak spin on the priest’s earlier assurance that all men are equal in the eyes of God). In the meantime, Salieri’s revenge on God’s proxy relies on melodramatic tropes: using the Mozarts’ maid Lori (Cynthia Nixon) as his spy in the household; appropriating one of Mozart’s compositions – the Requiem – as his own.
By the time it reaches the closing stages, Amadeus is an increasingly familiar Hollywood biopic. Mozart works himself to death putting together the Requiem and The Magic Flute at virtually the same time. Constanze, disturbed by her husband’s erratic behaviour, leaves him temporarily, taking the couple’s little son with her. With Mozart confined to bed, Salieri becomes his eager amanuensis for the Requiem. He means to steal the manuscript but is thwarted by Constanze’s return and violently suspicious reaction to Salieri’s presence in her home. As she and he argue, Mozart dies. Conventional as this episode is, it’s very watchable. Tom Hulce is easier to take once Mozart is too unwell to laugh. The tension between his gratitude for Salieri’s help and Salieri’s anxious impatience to get on with writing the Requiem down is more touching and more chilling than what has gone before.
Mozart is desperate to take a break from dictation; Salieri is reluctantly forced to accept this and catnaps on a bed nearby. Constanze’s unexpected return so takes him by surprise that he falls off the bed. He scrambles up and hurriedly fastens the buttons on his waistcoat but gets them wrong. Salieri’s comical dishevelment makes a welcome change. At court, F Murray Abraham cuts a handsome, anguine figure. Both there and in the hospital room, he handles his many lines dexterously. Almost inevitably, though, given that he’s sitting down throughout the scenes with the priest, his accomplished acting is mostly acting from the neck upwards (with a few hand movements). It’s a pleasure to see Abraham show another side when Salieri is made to look simply undignified rather than feel furiously humiliated. The film’s best supporting performance comes from Roy Dotrice, whose natural playing of Mozart’s stern father, Leopold, is refreshing. After Leopold’s death, his son writes Don Giovanni; Salieri cunningly perceives that the sinister Commendatore who reproaches Giovanni’s sinfulness is an expression of Mozart Jr’s self-reproach in relation to his late father. Roy Dotrice resists making Leopold’s paternal authority overbearing. It’s somewhat unaccountable that his son should resurrect him as an overpoweringly sinister figure – yet it’s psychologically persuasive, too.
Although Amadeus isn’t a piece with great female roles, Elizabeth Berridge does well as Constanze. In the much smaller part of Lori, Cynthia Nixon has an emotional authenticity that’s unusual in this film. Barbara Bryne is almost unbearable as Constanze’s mother though it’s quite a good joke that the piercing stridency of a scolding she gives her son-in-law is presented as his inspiration for the (similarly unbearable) Queen of the Night aria in The Magic Flute. Simon Callow is back for more, this time as Emanuel Schikaneder, an impresario and actor-singer who commissions Mozart to write The Magic Flute for Vienna’s popular theatre. Callow gives Schikaneder an American accent – hard to see why when the cast is a mixture of Brits and Americans, and the actors’ nationalities don’t correspond with particular social levels in Viennese society.
The operatic staging in the film, particularly the flamboyant kitsch excess that’s the trademark of Schikaneder productions, is spectacular, as are the interiors of the imperial palace, and an unending procession of ingenious costumes. The production design is by Patrizia von Brandenstein and the costumes by Theodor Pištěk. Both won Oscars, as did Forman, Abraham, Shaffer, and the make-up and sound teams. Academy members decreed Amadeus the Best Picture of the year. Accepting the award for Best Original Score for David Lean’s A Passage to India at the same ceremony, Maurice Jarre amusingly said, ‘I was lucky, Mozart was not eligible …’ Even so, he’s evidently why many people rate Amadeus so highly – as if the very use of Mozart’s music were a cinematic strength. It’s remarkable how many of the favourable reviews, old and new, on Rotten Tomatoes invoke Mozart as the film’s transcendent virtue. If you’re a fan, there must surely be many better ways of experiencing him than through Forman’s self-important movie.
At the end of Amadeus, a hospital attendant (Brian Pettifer) comes to escort Salieri to the bathroom before his breakfast of sugar rolls. (This sour man never loses his sweet tooth.) Leaving his room, the patient declares himself, to the hapless priest, to be the patron saint of mediocrities. As he’s wheeled down the corridor past the other inmates, Salieri makes a sign of the cross and blesses them: ‘Mediocrities everywhere, now and to come: I absolve you all! Amen! Amen! Amen!’ It must be assumed that Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer have finally decided that Salieri is off his rocker because the benediction makes no sense otherwise. The patients’ physical and mental deformities might be considered expressions of the obscene unfairness of God – which supposedly has impelled Salieri’s actions throughout. But these staring, drooling, writhing or shrouded figures are too extremely unfortunate to be mediocrities.
Before I went to this BFI screening, I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d seen the film of Amadeus before. It seemed surprising if I hadn’t: I was cinema-going very regularly at the time (the film was released in Britain in January 1985), especially to high-profile pictures. Yet I could remember next to nothing about it and realised that I must anyway have seen clips on television over the years. Not long into the 161 minutes, it occurred to me I had maybe walked out first time around but that kind of exit has always happened rarely enough to stay in my mind. This time, as I stuck it out, I didn’t find it all coming back to me. So I still don’t know if I’d already watched Amadeus in the cinema but I do know that I’ll never watch it again.
31 July 2025
