The Representation of the City in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus
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THE TALE OF TWO CITIES: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY IN PETER SHAFFER’S AMADEUS _____________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ______________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities _______________________ by Javier Garcia Spring 2016 Copyright by JAVIER GARCIA 2016 All Rights Reserved iii To my family, friends, and professors. Without you, I amount to nothing. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT .......................................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................................iii DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 2. CITY AS VIRTUE ............................................................................................................ 13 3. CITY AS VICE .................................................................................................................. 32 4. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 53 WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................................... 57 iv iii ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the representation of the city in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. The competitive conflict between the characters Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart of the play, two classical composers competing for the adulation of Emperor Joseph II, the late eighteenth-century ruler of Vienna, indirectly reveals interactions relevant to the relationship humans have to their city. These considerations fall under two of Carl Schorske’s conceptualizations of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century European city, the “city as virtue” and “city as vice.” Thus, the conflict between Salieri and Mozart will illustrate the nature of industry, art, and competition in relation to Schorske’s two concepts of the city, manifested in the play, while offering a new interpretation of Shaffer’s work. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 1979, British playwright Peter Shaffer premiered his new theatrical drama Amadeus at London's National Theatre to much fanfare. The play enchanted audiences with its portrayal of tragic jealousy encountering the unexpected nature of genius, the former represented by Antonio Salieri and the latter by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The conflict originates from nineteenth--century rumors that the former had poisoned the latter. Shaffer approaches these musical figures of Habsburg Vienna with this rumored conflict in mind, creating between them a level of interaction that drives the play’s narrative to its tragic end. The historical-fictional drama was a resounding financial and critical success in London and New York. It saw subsequent productions throughout the world in the following years. Building on this success, Shaffer in 1984 collaborated with director Milos Forman to bring the theatrical drama to the movie screen, earning several Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. At the onset of the play, the audience finds an aged Salieri, in 1823, confessing to the murder of Mozart thirty years earlier. Through his recollections, Salieri transports the audience to late eighteenth-century Vienna. He narrates the encounter with Mozart that motivates the narrative. Salieri burnt with jealousy. He yearned for Mozart's musical talent, which to him evoked God’s beauty. Yet, he found contradiction in Mozart’s nature, whose vulgarity, immaturity, and arrogance was an unsavory reality. With every one of Mozart’s adagios, Salieri's connection to God crumbled, having mirrored his life 2 to God’s order. He questioned the perceived preference for Mozart. In response, he chose to ruin the influence of God through Mozart. Salieri vows revenge against both figure and man, driving the wedge between his virtue and his sanity. The reversal of Salieri’s nature, from virtue to vice, is the focal bridge to this paper’s historical foregrounding. The historical –fictional drama was a resounding financial and critical success in its time. It saw subsequent productions throughout the world in the following years. Building on this success, Shaffer in 1984 collaborated with director Milos Forman to bring the theatrical drama to the movie screen. Yet, the choice of staging the drama in eighteenth-century Hapsburg Vienna, along with the use of historical content, elicits more meaning than a mere example of Shaffer’s artistic conceit. On their surface, the play and its cinematic counterpart may appear anything but historically representative of eighteenth-century Vienna. Shaffer has stated that he intended Amadeus as a biography of Mozart, embellishing the rumored narrative with “fictional ornament” (qtd. in Brown 50). On the question of authenticity and artistic revisionism, there is some consensus among critics and scholars that the play makes a farce of Mozart’s and Salieri’s legacy. However, this paper avoids the debate about the play’s conflicted relationship to historical authenticity. Instead, the focus lies upon a theme within a historical framework not yet approached in the body of literature, of a new relationship forged with historical inquiry. The literature in question coalesce in five categories, from analysis and criticism, in considerable overlap: formalist, thematic, socio-psychological, historical and metaphysical. That these categories in this body of literature exist speaks of the play’s varying levels of interpretation. One of the leading 3 scholars of Shaffer’s repertoire, C.J. Gianakaris comprehensively explores psychological, thematic, historical, and formal properties of Amadeus. In his book Modern Dramatists: Peter Shaffer, Gianakaris discusses the grand achievement of Amadeus in the sixth chapter, providing a summary of the plot, and a survey of its theatrical elements that were responsible for its success in contrast to Shaffer’s earlier work. More importantly, the author introduces the thematic and psychoanalytical dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian personalities – of reason versus baseness - to describe the genesis of Salieri’s and Mozart’s relationship. In addition, he briefly mentions other themes of note: personal rivalry, social antagonisms, and political and artistic intrigue on social and metaphysical grounds. C.J. Gianakari’s second book, Peter Shaffer: A Casebook, contains a collection of scholarly articles inclusive of the themes mentioned above. In his own entry, “Fair Play? Peter Shaffer’s treatment of Mozart in Amadeus,” Gianakaris defends Shaffer’s characterization of Mozart as having licentious desires, childish manners and scatological speech, based on research of Mozart’s personal correspondence with friends and relatives. The language and voice of Mozart in his letters suggest that Shaffer’s depiction may have some truth. Yet, the use of personal and private correspondence to produce the wholeness of a historical figure is limited to private identity. It is insufficient to suggest that those letters are indicative of his social and cultural persona in Vienna, a crucial aspect of Mozart’s theatrical personality. In “Shaffer’s Revisions in “Amadeus,” “Drama into Film,” and “A Playwright looks at Mozart: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus” Gianakaris approaches the play’s formal structure, its artistic evolution from play to film, and its 4 success in spite of the structure employed – two act rendition which has similarities to Aristotle’s theatrical system and Brecht’s epic tropes. These articles are theatrical critiques that surely complement present scholarly work but fail to give voice to the play’s historical potency. Other scholars provide rather interesting critiques about Amadeus’ formal and thematic structure. The first, “Straddling a Dual Poetic in Amadeus: Salieri as Tragic Hero and Joker,” by Felicia H. Londre, refutes the strictly Aristotelian aspects of the play, that of recognition, reversal and empathy in its construction of Salieri. Instead, Londre applies Augusto Boal’s concept of the “Joker” complex against the protagonists, an omniscient, narrative perspective that explains actions taken (120-121). In a sense, the “Joker” complex, according to Londre, serves to substantiate Salieri’s potential for empathy when the Aristotelian system of the tragic hero is insufficient. This is what she refers to as “Dual Poetics” (115). The idea that Shaffer could not fashion Salieri a tragic hero, however, fails to undo the effect that reversal and recognition produce, projecting the transformation of Salieri in narrative from normative to disorderly conduct. It exemplifies the prevalence of dichotomies within and because of interpretive analysis. The second foray into formal and thematic structure is the expansive study “On the Structure of Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’” by Werner Huber Hubert Zapt. The article examines interdisciplinary and multifaceted dimensions of Shaffer’s play. Huber and Zapt argue that the play employs various subjects to “achieve the maximum exploration” of themes and “maximum communication”