The Representation of the City in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus

Home , Amadeus (play), Antonio Salieri, Peter Shaffer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

2016

iii

To my family, friends, and professors.

Without you, I amount to nothing.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

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

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.

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

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

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

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” between the performance and audience (301).

As a whole two-act play consisting of a climax and denouement, the play is

multidimensional in that it contains socio-political, metaphysical, and psychoanalytical themes with Salieri and Mozart as the foci. The deconstruction of Salieri’s and Mozart’s fictional characterization summons the existence of comparative dichotomies. These characters convey order and chaos, monarchy and democracy, mediocrity and genius, relating to Gianakaris’ allusions to the Apollonian and Dionysian contrast, the constant struggle of the super ego and id, of difference – rather, the more appropriate term is conflict - coming to the foreground as the play’s engine. In this regard, Huber and Zapt elevate the potency of the play into a realm accessible to theoretical purpose.

Relative to the theme of thematic dichotomy, Peter Plunka’s book, Peter Shaffer:

Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theater, explores the conservative nature of Salieri’s personality. The book contains three chapters worth noting: “Peter Shaffer: Sociologist of the Theater,” “Form Follows Function” and “Amadeus: Just the Right Notes.” The first conveys Shaffer’s success in dramatizing an individual’s sociological viewpoint of society and its institutions. The second chapter describes Shaffer’s aesthetic influences in form, according to Plunka, including Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and Brecht’s “Total

Theater” (39-43). Aspects of these influences include the treatment of ceremony and ritual, the narrator’s function in regards to the ideas on display, and the dialectical conflict between opposing characterizations (37). However, Plunka adds that Shaffer’s play represents unified and complex drama that embodies sociological and psychological questions that Artuad ignored, but without the didactic nature of Brechtian theatre. As a result, the theme of dialectical conflict streams through Plunka’s chapters, reappearing in a chapter dedicated to the play, “Amadeus: Just the Right Notes.” Here again, Plunka

discerns sociological roles as forms of ritual in theatre, applying such roles to Salieri and

Mozart. He argues that their dramatic tension resembles the Apollonian and Dionysian discourse of difference. One is orderly, conformist, conservative and the other vivacious, radical and potent. He increasingly turns his attention to Salieri’s ritualized behavior, of the pious, chaste and culturally successful court composer aligned with a just and

sympathetic God. Plunka attributes this ritualized behavior to conservatism. However, the

plausibility of this social interpretation of Salieri diminishes after the first act. By the

second act, as his ambivalence and jealousy intensifies, his orderly, conservative nature

transgresses to the reactionary and unethical pariah to God’s assumed apathy. Though it

is necessary to examine Salieri’s conservative tendencies, his turn to vice in the second

act eclipses the conservatism that Plunka implies, becoming the paradoxical force that

equally threatens the nature of conservatism and progress. The ritual is broken directly

and indirectly. Thus, the reoccurring notion of conflict and difference in this work creates

the gulf in the narrative needed to peruse the play from dichotomous perspectives.

The treatment of God in Amadeus has kindled the interest of some scholars. In his

article, “Peter Shaffer's Continued Quest for God in ‘Amadeus,’” Daniel Jones analyzes

the thematic anti-religiosity that stems from his disillusionment with God and faith. Jones

entertains the idea that Salieri as a child encounters a God capable of Faustian pacts, an

act equally virtuous and opportunistic that influences Salieri’s metaphysical rationality.

Salieri’s recognition that God endows Mozart with exquisite musical prowess, the

childish creature, however, disorients and destabilizes his metaphysical connection to

God. As Jones says, Salieri remained trapped “between reason and faith” (152). Salieri

firmly believes that one reaches music through God. Under this religious condition, Jones

suggests that Salieri misunderstands his relationship to God and art, which influences his

dual relationship with Mozart. In a similar article “Thinking about God and Mozart: The

Salieris of Pušhkin and Peter Shaffer,” Martin Bidney discusses similarities between

Alexander Pušhkin’s play, Mozart and Salieri, and Shaffer’s work, Pušhkin’s play being

the reinterpretation of nineteenth-century rumors about Mozart’s demise in youth. Bidney

establishes his argument under the central issue, that the conflict in these plays is a

“Jobean” one (184). Salieri in both versions embodies the idea that artistic creativity, like

faith, should belong to the righteous and pious. The undeserving Mozart symbolizes

God’s beauty, with the result that Salieri, like Job, feels defrauded by God and art (184).

In a similar fashion, in “Mozart: A Case Study in Logocentric Repression”

Katherine Arens deconstructs Salieri’s relationship to God and to Mozart by arguing that

Salieri’s behavior provides evidence of other socio-psychological-metaphysical meaning.

Arens argues that Salieri sought the Divine on earth, in men. In terms of composing, music proves the existence of God through the graces of the composer (161). This is the dramatic conflict of the play; mortal men cannot summon genius and God. Rather, it appears and reappears in this world as it pleases. According to Arens, Shaffer does not translate genius to present rewards of financial and cultural success. Without genius,

Salieri sours in Vienna while Mozart flounders financially and culturally. Thus, Arens believes Shaffer produces in this play a dual tragedy, in that “Salieri only is the inverted reflection of Mozart’s genius cliché: being strong and resourceful and evil where Mozart is weak, helpless, and victimized in his naivete” (165). Arens admits that Shaffer’s

message is overtly anti-humanistic, in that theatrical conflict between human and deity

results in the former resorting to evil when genius, or in this case the divine, is

misunderstood or problematic. In other words, material society corrupts humanity;

spirituality elevates it. Arens counters that genius should imply valuable resourcefulness

and intuition beyond artistic production. Shaffer has cleverly deferred these questions,

rather submitting to the idea that Salieri’s and Mozart’s belief in God is “senseless” and

“illogical” (165). Thus, the theatrical conflict reaches a complex impasse that renders the dualities present in the play in new, problematic terms. It is in this spirit, of the polarizing effect of the play’s central conflict, that the paper shall entertain new historicized meaning, in that the conflict between characters shall relate to a broader conceptualization of urban cities in transformation.

In his dissertation, The Ritual Plays of Peter Shaffer, John Watson discusses the symbolism and ritual of Amadeus. He inspects the performative and structural aspects in

the attempt to deduce their symbolic or ritual purpose. He argues that Shaffer is

concerned with belief, ritual, and ceremony, as well as the ability to communicate to its

audience thematic meaning. Ultimately, the concept of ritual and its thematic rewards in

the scheme of Shaffer’s art insufficiently describes the historical significance and

revision of the play’s subject matter.

In his book detailing the professional, private, and social experiences of Mozart in

Vienna, Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791, Volkmar Braunbehrens briefly argues that

Shaffer’s theatrical depiction of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rumors of a poisoned Mozart has no grounding in historical reality (409). To him, there is no

evidence to substantiate that Salieri held vengeful animosity or murderous intent against

his peer Mozart. However, Braunbehrens is uninterested in pursuing the point further.

Similarly, A. Peter Brown’s article “Amadeus and Mozart: Setting the Record

Straight” likens the treatment of historical subject matter by Shaffer to “fictional ornament” (51). Shaffer’s revising of Mozart’s legacy compares to Lorenzo De Ponte’s

translation of Beaumarchais’s play Le Mariage de Figaro into a libretto. Alterations were

necessary to fashion and streamline Beaumarchais’s original content into Mozart’s Le

nozze di Figaro. Furthermore, Brown would agree with Braunbehrens that Salieri’s

conflict with Mozart was an exaggeration, due in part to Constance’s insistence in her

letters upon his maleficence. He deduces from the popularity of the play the intent of

Shaffer to carrying out the lasting fascination with Mozart from the last two centuries

(65). Brown concludes that historical authenticity or accuracy are irrelevant in this

regard. The idea of Mozart lies beyond authentic explication.

Furthermore, Joseph Horowitz maintains a confrontational stance against Shaffer

and Amadeus. Disenchanted with Shaffer’s and Forman’s work, which he calls a

“magnificent-production,” he conveys the play’s appeal to both mass and “snob”

audiences. He defines this duality of appeal with Dwight Mcdonald’s notion of

“midcult,” the idea that any production may contain the characteristics of mass culture

and the superficial adornment of high art (1). According to Mcdonald, the production of

midcult art elevates mass culture but at once corrupts high art (5). As such, Horowitz

negates Shaffer’s assertion that the depiction of Mozart is purely artistic by suggesting

the appeal of Mozart’s name to audiences. The use of fictional characters would have

diminished the plays appeal (4). Perhaps unjustifiably, Horowitz reduces the play to a

theatrical pastiche of history and music. In the film version of the play, a musical except

from Don Giovanni’s overture becomes an intruding leitmotiv used to emphasize the

dramatic significance of a scene. Horowitz’s materialist approach to Shaffer’s and

Forman’s work thus lends to its inauthenticity, though its contemporary approach limits

the plausibility of new contextual meaning.

On the other hand, Simon Keefe’s “Beyond Fact and Fiction, Scholarly and

Popular: Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman’s Amadeus at 25” is the antidote to Horowitz’s

critique. Keefe is interested in the contemporary perception of Mozart and Salieri and its

subject matter. The selectivity and factual nature of the works are a moot point to Keefe.

Instead, he attributes its significance to the role that contemporary audiences maintain, to

evaluate the plausibility and implausibility of both versions and the numerous

biographers of Mozart in addition to the roles that audiences have in it (52). His

conclusion opens up the play to contemporary interpretation that other scholars have

pursued, without negating its place in the theatrical world.

Shaffer contended he claimed the poetic license of story-telling (qtd. in Brown,

50). If poetic license allows the artist to approach various concepts and themes within a

historicized narrative, then what are the historical, social, and intellectual implications of

Salieri and Mozart’s world? They are rather concealed windows to the political and

economic climate of Hapsburg Vienna, as well as the representation of artistic societies

and proto-industrialization of the late eighteenth century. Unlike other European cities, late eighteenth-century Vienna offered little in cultural and economic change. By the late

eighteenth century, cities such as London and Paris had risen in stature, both cultural and

industrial. Vienna of this era was subject to staunch Catholicism and monarchical

despotism (Kann 173-174; Beales 279-280). As such, Vienna’s did not foster its own

brand of distinct movement of progressive inquiry comparable to the French and German

Enlightenment, only taking for itself certain political and economic aspects that matched with the aims of Habsburg absolute rule.

In his evaluation of the eighteenth century city, Carl Schorske argues that the

some of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, namely Voltaire and Adam Smith,

personified the city as a hub of optimistic progress. To Voltaire and Smith, the city

encapsulated cultural, economic, and social luxuries that served as civilizing agents; they

perceived the city as the beacon of moral and cultural advancement. Drawing on these

ideas, Schorske constructs a conceptual model of the city based on one principle, virtue,

centered on organic progress involving art, industry and culture. Voltaire argued that this

such virtue was a top down process, a cultivation of culture, which began under the

nobility and trickled down to the unlearned masses. The nobility and other members of

the upper class mediated access to art and culture and all its urban luxuries with their

control of economic and cultural industries. Thus, industry in the city made abundant the artful and cultural ideas and expressions that Voltaire claimed would civilize the common person. In addition, industry created work and opportunity, representing another venue of growth in terms of wealth and progress. To this ideal Salieri closely relates, particularly in his pursuit of musical grandeur, though Mozart too partakes in its practice with less

financial success. As such, these conceptualizations of virtue, which Schorske presents,

are succinctly termed the “city as virtue.”

However, Schorske additionally identified characteristics of the urban

environment that ran contrary to the optimism of Voltaire and Smith. By the mid to late

eighteenth century, the changing economies and urban environments prompted notions of the future destructiveness of urban industry. Early industrial infrastructure was in its infancy in the eighteen century, but capitalist enterprise gained in strength by the turn of the century. Pollution, poor living standards, commodification, and competitiveness overtook the major European cities, as in mid-nineteenth-century London. Men such as

Oliver Goldsmith and Mercier de la Riviere foresaw the growth of urban decay. Wealth would remain in the hands of the few and the worker’s and peasant’s suffering would endure, they warned. This is the city of vice, in Schorske’s terms. The use of the term vice does not merely imply the opposite of spiritual or religious virtue, but rather the economic and social actions by humans that veered toward destructive, corrupt, or decayed outcomes. The concept of the city of vice overtook Voltaire’s, Smith’s, and

Fichte’s urban optimism, causing a lasting shift away from the city to the hinterland as the virtuous setting, giving birth to Romanticism, manifested partly in the late-eighteenth and fully in the early-nineteenth century among social and political thinkers, poets, and novelists.

Unsurprisingly, Salieri is a creature of this negative sentiment. The clash between man, music, patronage, and wealth constitutes an inescapable aspect of vice in the play.

On the one hand, Salieri’s treatment of Mozart, whom he sees as an earthly tool of the

deity, denigrates his pious and orderly world. On the other hand, Mozart’s own eccentric

musical superiority comes into conflict with Salieri’s reasons for being. These characters

react to a world driven by competitive wealth and musical fame. More importantly, they

pursue fame and wealth from competitive music-making, solely centered within the

musical world of Vienna. But they willingly proceed with the business of music for the

reader to discover that unlike the modern capitalist state, their competition will represent

both an act of virtue, given their mastery of their art, and an act of vice, expressed

through their need to rise artistically, culturally and metaphysically. Salieri and Mozart’s dramatized conflict likewise symbolizes not only aesthetic and cultural norms of their era, but is further evidence of a competition in composition and performance that is equally positive as it is negative.

In this regard, the play and film illustrate an insidiously economic and social dimension in their primary conflict: Salieri’s rigid and mediocre stability against

Mozart’s own unstable genius and creativity. Nonetheless, these men immersed themselves in a competition that greatly affected their standing. In particular, Salieri will exhibit corrupt and evil behavior, suggesting the dichotomy of good versus evil applies to this conflict.

Of this character dichotomy, Gianakaris, Plunka, Zapt and Huber are correct in discussing the implications of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian-Dionysian complex within the play. The personality of order and morality, attributes of the

Hellenistic god Apollo, juxtaposes the debauched and irrational persona of the god

Dionysus. It is an envisioning of dual archetypal character models within the play,

grounded upon the notion of conflict and difference. For instance, the oppositional

character types of Salieri and Mozart represent archetypes in conflict. Order comes into

conflict with disorder, the outcome becoming Salieri’s turn vice and evil. However, their

paths cross in the production and performance of opera. Ironically, the virtue of industry

(in this case, the composition of music) shall also drive these composers to the throngs of

vice through competitive conflict, an event witnessed by venticelli, the messengers of all

Vienna. However, as residents of Vienna, they pursue their artistic and economic goals to their ends and begin to sketch an indirect connection to urban thought. It is in this regard that the relevance of the concepts of Schorske will become manifest.

As such, the history of Vienna and of Habsburg Austria in the eighteenth century, though contrary to the intellectual advancements and cultural pleasures of London and

Paris, presents a situation that seems compatible with Schorske’s conceptions.

Unrepentantly Catholic and despotic, its rulers attempted to reform and modernize the whole of Austrian empire without disrupting its political and religious structure. In

particular, Joseph II sought to centralize all aspects of Austrian society under his rule, attributed to his desire to project himself as a modern reformist ruler, like Frederick II of

German Prussia (Kann 125; Fichtner 81).

The study will attempt to describe the connections between the play and these

conceptions of the city. The chapters will follow the chronological order of both the

play’s plot and Schorske’s historical conceptions. Therefore, chapter one of this study shall illuminate the relationship of Salieri’s and Mozart’s actions of Act 1 to Schorske’s first urban concept, the city of virtue. With the concept of urban virtue in mind, chapter

one will examine the signs of virtue within the characterization of Salieri, Mozart, and their peers in the first act of the play. The play’s protagonists welcome the possibility of symbolizing cultural and industrial progress championed by Voltaire, in which industry and pleasure affirms the city’s exceptionality.

Foregoing Act 1 entirely, the second chapter will examine the corrosive force of vice in the play, represented by the consequent alteration of the city in Western and

Central Europe. The loss of virtue begins with Salieri intensifying his musical competition with Mozart. Much the consequence of urban industry and culture, the competition between these men expounds Salieri’s reactions against aesthetic and spiritual notions of music and God, culminating in the process of music-making.

Competition ensures for Salieri the stability of wealth, fame, and identity. In doing so,

Salieri turns against man and God, demonstrating the shift from the city of promise to the city of depravity. Through and through, the shift of virtue to vice, as in the city, ultimately occurs in the passionate pursuit of artistic, cultural, and material stability by

Salieri and Mozart in Shaffer’s portrayal. It is the defining moment of the play in which the city devolves from virtue to its opposite, illustrating the historical urban transformation between the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.

The strength of this analysis shall hinge upon the plausibility of Schorske’s urban theories relating to the competitive diffusion of conflict in Amadeus, with the play’s primary characters being the center of the analysis. The thesis of this paper will display

Salieri’s and Mozart’s microcosmic embodiment of the qualities of virtue and vice. Most of the first act supports the theoretical framework of this paper as the plot slowly shifts

from examples of virtue to increasing conflict. However, the concept of vice cannot alone substantiate the shift of tone from virtue to annoyance to aggression on the part of Salieri.

Therefore, the paper shall employ the Aristotelian concepts of recognition and reversal to address the shift from fortune to ruin. Once these Aristotelian concepts define the act of transformation, then Schorske’s concepts serve to place these characters in a clearer historical context.

One can start by looking at the conflict between Salieri and Mozart in the first act.

Their conflict, a musical competition of unique sorts, expresses qualities one could deem

virtuous and immoral. I will apply a Marxist methodology to engage with the socio-

economic meaning of this competitive conflict. Specifically, the paper will examine the

transformative power of money as another dimension of virtue and vice. Though the play

does not directly discuss the idea of money, musical production presents rather essential

connections to cultural and industrial gain. Marx’ writings provide insight into the connections between money and social relationships. In this regard, the second chapter shall increasingly turn to Marx’ analysis of money as a way to understand the consequence of vice following Salieris’s competitive aggression. In addition, contextualization of the play in relation to contemporaneous discourse and Marxism serves to convey a broader illustration of Salieri and Mozart and their Viennese environment. The application of Schorske’s urban concepts, Aristotelian formal concepts, and Marxist thought comprises the framework from which I will discuss Amadeus’s relation to economic and cultural thought of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 2

CITY AS VIRTUE

Shaffer’s modern characterizations in Amadeus yields appealing biographical

problems. Though I have no intent to question the validity of Shaffer’s artistic

interpretation of these men, there are opportunities to suggest what I would call urban

meaning. Shaffer’s blend of artistic representation with history mimics a theatrical

tradition that dates back to Sophocles, intentionally obscuring historic meaning with

dramatic significance. However, by applying Carl Schorske’s models of the city, one can

explore new historical meaning within the play. Evidence from the play will stress that

Antonio Salieri’s relationship to the city is one marked by his moral pursuit of the music of Vienna. More importantly, his musical competition with Mozart in Vienna will express his virtue that defines Salieri.

The discussion begins with one aspect of the play that holds true to Schorske’s

models for the city: the characters’ social and economic relationship to their peers and to

Vienna. In his Idea of the City, he provides two models with which to interpret the city:

city as virtue and city of vice. Each model represents eighteenth century discourse about

the construction of a city’s essence. This chapter will consider the notion of the city as a

center for virtue by presenting character studies of Salieri and Mozart. Specifically, the

model of virtue relies upon Voltaire’s urban notions of pleasure and industry of the

eighteenth century city. Using Amadeus as a backdrop for the model, the chapter will

discuss pleasure and industry relevant to Salieri and Mozart.

What then is the urban and historical relevance of Amadeus? What accuracies can we mine from the caves of the play? Several Shaffer scholars find these questions moot.

For example, in their critique of Amadeus, scholars Huber and Hubert argue that the play distorts past, present, and future reality, complicating the audience’s reception (301). The play oscillates from 1823, during Salieri’s old age, to the 1780s. Reception is mediated by one narrative voice, Salieri. Given that the audience is at the mercy of Salieri’s subjectivity, his narration does not necessarily cloud the cultural, economic, and political ambitions and traditions of his period. In this regard, Shaffer deserves credit for this.

Despite the use of artistic license, Shaffer represents creative men engaged in industry and social mobility within an urban environment fixated upon musical ambition and virtuosity. If we narrow our focus to the virtuous actions of Salieri and Mozart, then we can consider the extent of virtue in the play as the defining character of the city. In other words, these men are virtuous at one level and when applied to the city model, the play suggests historical relevancy. This requires consideration of their actions relative to the urban environment.

Let us discuss the meaning of pleasure and industry as described by Schorske.

Consider Voltaire, one of the Enlightenment's most prolific advocates. In search of the heavenly city, Voltaire had looked towards eighteenth century London for inspiration.

For him, London encapsulated the ideals of progress for all humanity (Schorske, 38).

Schorske makes a distinction in Voltaire’s inclination for industry. Voltaire determined progress to be a consequence of an industrious aristocracy. The industry they controlled, whether economic, artistic, or cultural, was solely responsible for the spread of taste,

19 reason, and civilization. In addition, luxury, wealth, stratification, and stability became pleasures that trickled down to the urban mass as consequences of the nobility’s industry.

The product of virtue flowed from the top of urban society to the middle and poorer urban classes. The aristocratic bons vivants and mondains encouraged industry to improve the social and financial state of the lower classes by bringing art, culture, and pleasure to them, an activity increasingly feasible in the city (Schorske 39). This assertion by Voltaire resembles the political apparatus of the Baroque city, emphasized by Lewis Mumford in his book, City in History. Mumford notes that kings, queens, and the nobility of the eighteenth century created the social conditions, which its inhabitants enjoyed. (354) Ultimately, Voltaire treats the city as a civilizing force. Negotiated by the highest societal orders, the goodness of progress comes into fruition when pleasure takes form from industry, encapsulating the best of human activity in the city: culture, economy, and power. We will consider the idea of industry and its production of pleasure in Salieri and Mozart’s musical competition as expressions of urban virtue within their work.

With these models of progress in mind, what can historical context reveal about the play’s Vienna? In the eighteenth-century, Vienna was a city taken under the wave of moderated reform. The historical moment in question begins with Joseph II’s Habsburg rule of Vienna from 1780 to 1790. His rule of the Austrian Empire is a period marked by an ambitious and radical attempt to reconstruct Austria’s political, religious, and civic virtue (Beales 3-4; Kann 136-137). Joseph’s brand of reform disrupted the traditional societal and cultural realities (Fichtner 82-85). He sought to centralize the various sectors

20 of government and society under the direct authority of the monarch. He forcibly advocated a program first initiated by his mother, Maria Theresa. Modeled upon the

States of the “enlightened princes” Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia who consolidated State and culture under their authority, Joseph II represents the movement of

Enlightened Absolutism, a term coined by historians after the eighteenth century (Beales

270). Under absolutism, Joseph II fashioned an idiosyncratic conception of rule (Beales

9-10; Fichtner 80). He envisioned a proto-national state, centralized under his rule, and guided by his philosophes of autocratic control, borrowing progressive ideas of self-rule, one of which he alone determines. Under it, the Austrian sectors of the empire became more German, more industrious, more centralized. A precarious and radical moment in history for many Austrian subjects, Joseph II’s rule mostly coincides with the play’s chronology of Salieri and Mozart’s musical period.

Concerning the mysterious circumstances of Mozart’s death, the poison theories which implicated Salieri were first projected by Mozart’s widow Constanze

(Braunbehrens, 409). Relating to this, Martin Bidney identifies stark similarities between

Shaffer’s drama and Alexander Pushkin’s dramatic poem Mozart and Salieri (183). The primary comparison lies with Salieri’s envy of Mozart’s musical skill. Pushkin implies that the composer poisoned Mozart in a fit of jealousy and rage. He speaks of Salieri’s transformation from pious subject to jealous murderer, preventing Mozart from reaping success. However, musicologist John Rice suggests that any conflict between Salieri and

Mozart was friendly but competitive. They were as much suspicious competitors for court patronage as victims of the court’s unpredictable precariousness (487). Yet,

Shaffer’s portrayal of Salieri can arouse ambivalence in the modern audience. Salieri’s struggle against God, Mozart, and ultimately his own ego portrays a character--immoral, arrogant, and unjust—at war with his childish, licentious but truly talented rival. Keir

Elam would argue that the logic of his characterization does not follow the logic of the

“external world” (the audience), instead conveying the truth of his “distorted world” (qtd. in Aston 42-3). For example, in the cinematic version of the “bargain” scene, the adolescent Salieri deliberates with God, the source of his unbounded talent. In return,

Salieri submits to God, adopts Christian virtues of chastity, faith, charity, and temperance, and declares: “I will live with virtue. I will strive to better the lot of my fellows. And I will honor You with much music all the days of my life!” (19). The

Aristotelian reversal of his fortune, however, manifests in the appearance and the recognition of Mozart’s “superior” talents. In the first act, Salieri hears Mozart’s Adagio for the Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments and beckons to God. He exclaims,

“What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it your need?” (30). His concern with Mozart’s music parallels the absurdity of his dramatic world. Salieri admonishes

God, the architect of his world, for exalting Mozart with the highest talents— “a creature whose own voice I had also heard - and it was the voice of an obscene child” (30). Salieri must retaliate in full to protect his virtue. This marks the start of a competition between these men for the chance to produce the greatest music. In this conflict, the existence of

Mozart brings into question Salieri’s own identity.

Let us again consider the introduction of Mozart in Salieri’s world. The organic beauty of Mozart’s adagio convinces Salieri of the severe implications of his own musical competitiveness. In his book Peter Shaffer, Peter Plunka perceives the character of Salieri in social terms. Salieri’s characterization symbolizes a conservative role player, at both secure in a world and highly respected and adored by his peers (Plunka 31). C.J

Gianakaris expands on Plunka’s character study by relating Salieri’s rigidity to

Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy (120). To Gianakaris, Salieri represents the conventional character type defined by conservative society. Before Mozart, Salieri had prospered by conforming to the morals and traditions of his day, including a righteous belief in the order and reason of God. This assertion requires further attention. Let us assume that God honored their agreement. Righteousness and morality promised not only musical greatness but also admiration from his peers. Let us also assume that God willingly granted Salieri the musical talents necessary for the greatness he deserved. How then does God’s approval coalesce in Salieri’s world? The simple answer is that with the pursuit of music in the city came the reward of admiration and fame, the prominence of cultural industry administered exclusively by the economy of music in Vienna, and held in high regard by Salieri. Thus, Salieri believes in two ideals: the existence of God’s orderliness and that of human industry, which brought fruition to his art.

To understand aspects of Salieri’s pursuit of industry, one must turn first to

Voltaire’s poem, “Le Mondain,” which offers a deeper conception of pleasure and industry. In “Le Mondain,” Voltaire decries the material and abstract riches of Paris. To him, the cultural and physical abundance of the city imparts the grand joys and riches

available to the urban dweller. He says, “I own, I like this age profane; I love the

pleasures of a court; I love the arts of every sort” (84). In all fairness, the poetic

declaration seems to cater to a specific audience. It speaks to the educated, the rich proto-

bourgeois, the cultured elites, and the eccentric urban dweller of his time, the small but

burgeoning sector of eighteenth-century Parisian society. These men prosper in an “iron

age” that brings new “pleasures and desires” (Voltaire 88). This type of diction suggests

Voltaire’s preference for the courts and the nobility’s control over the pleasure and

industry sectors of Paris. Those afforded education, privilege, and authority controlled the

means for social progress: art, culture, law, and industry. Seen through the lens of

Marxism, his diction also conveys the power of privileged groups that comes to define

the means of cultural production. A lack of competition enabled Salieri’s production to

prosper, promising that more pleasure would follow. It speaks of monopoly enjoyed by

both the nobility and in this case, Salieri. Thus, the pleasurable affections of cultural

production ensure that consumption by the rest of the city will follow; the production of

culture, as an industry, takes shape within the economic codification of the pleasure

principle.

As such, the principle of pleasure contains dialectical meaning. The production of

pleasure signified the possession and consumption of goods and luxuries. Additionally,

the lack of competition provided that the composer would not lack pleasure. This notion

of abstract pleasure produces the well-being afforded from its consumption. This form of

“pleasurable” consumption manifests itself in the consuming habits of the privileged

urban dweller, so very close to the commercial markets. Voltaire poetically celebrates

these concepts of pleasure and industry as the consequence of the virtuous city. However,

this form of pleasure consumption has economic and social value in the city. To Voltaire,

the consumption of pleasure by the upper class, in this case the monarch and aristocrats,

encourages the transmission of virtue and progress. The cultural production of art, music,

and other aspects of culture takes shape within a city that values the principles of pleasure

and industry. This sort of artistic and cultural production stimulates markets and shops

that undeniably provide financial and cultural opportunity to the lower classes (Schorske

38-9). In late-eighteenth-century Vienna, the business of music reigned as the supreme

cultural transmission of pleasure (Landon 200). The Vienna of Amadeus mirrors various

aspects of Voltaire’s perception of urban virtue. The notions of pleasure, industry, and

their socio-economic relationship to the city are indeed a revelatory representation of

civilization in the play, music being the cultural production that simultaneously unites

people as they consume it. Again, this form of production prospered without conflict from competing forces, an aspect of production ignored by Schorske. It is no surprise that

Salieri conforms his desires to higher, pleasurable tastes. One must be wary of generalizing taste to mass society when it was the nobility, as Voltaire has argued, that created the progress necessary in the virtuous city, rather than the middle and poorer classes of the city.

How does the notion of pleasure further manifest in Shaffer’s characterization of

Salieri? Early in the play, Salieri admits to an unquenchable lust for the “sweetmeats of

Northern Italy.” His lust for sweets triggers gastric remembrances of “Milanese biscuits!

Sienna macaroons! Snow dumplings with pistachio sauce!” (16). This gastric lust for

Italian sweet delicacies is Salieri’s first pursuit of pleasure. In every salon and aristocratic dwellings, he marvels at every sweet morsel within his reach. Thus, the availability of sweet delicacies illustrates the pervasiveness of pleasure in Viennese high society. There is discernable irony in his pursuit of pleasure: Mozart stumbles upon Salieri while unabashedly admiring the sweet delicacies set out in a palace room. Their availability also contextualizes the transmission of pleasure among Viennese high society. For example, in the play Salieri’s lust for pleasure materializes in Mozart’s concert at the

Library of Baroness Waldstadten while the cinematic version of this event occurs in

Cardinal Ricoletto’s palace of the same performance. Both moments of Salieri’s insatiability are evidence of Voltaire’s notion of pleasure in the play, beyond the simple enjoyment of delicacies for its own sake. In another scene, Salieri attempts to seduce

Mozart’s wife Constanze with brandied chestnuts, a delicacy unknown to her and undoubtedly a product beyond her means. Known to Salieri as “Nipples of Venus,” the sexualization of the chestnut denotes the powerful properties of the pleasure principle.

The chestnut not only represents Salieri’s predisposition for aristocratic pleasure but also transforms the delicacy into a vehicle for the transmission of virtue as the natural production within the deeper, cultural, political, and economic system of ideology. In other words, the broad consumption of urban industry in the transmission of ideas and ideals began with the monopolizing patronage of the prince and aristocracy. The desirable delicacy connotes both the lower class dependency upon the nobility and the transmission of cultural pleasure through social and economic hierarchical lines. The hierarchy then flows with culture and industry, beginning with the crown, nobility, and

26 high bourgeoisie, and arrives among the masses in the shape of social and financial possibility and consumption, an idea that Voltaire regarded as the channeling of civilized virtue. Aware of the aristocracy’s communicative powers, Viennese observer Johann

Pezzl suggests that the urban public respected the aristocracy for this very transmission, honoring them for having created the various industries that benefited ordinary Viennese

(Landon 71). Perhaps Salieri’s insatiable need for delicacies represents two outcomes: the monopolized transmission of high-class virtue and the role he plays in its transmission.

Yet, there is another manner in which Salieri validates the necessity of the city, one that negotiates the drama of the play: the cultural production of music. In this sense,

Salieri’s own composition of music personifies his secondary form of pleasure and the existence of industry in Vienna. Scholars such as Gianakaris, Hubert, Plunka, and Zapt have analyzed the use of music to various degrees, relating the power of music more closely to the conflict between Salieri and God, Mozart, and his mediocrity. However, there is also a material subtext to the play’s use of music. Simply put, the pleasure from music which Salieri alone experiences denotes the existence of monopolized industry, his music that bred material and physical pleasure in Vienna. This environment affords

Salieri prosperity. As mentioned above, the industry of music signified one of Vienna’s visible characteristics. Consider, for example, Salieri’s upbringing. Salieri was born in

Legnano, a small town in Northern Italy, to “a small town merchant and his small town wife” (18). Knowledge of Mozart playing to the ears of princes and aristocrats across

Europe left an imposing impression upon the young Salieri. It ignites the competitive fire within him. He, like Mozart, yearns for musical fame, which would transmit his art

27 throughout Europe, propelling his idiosyncratic music to the yearning nobility, masters of its upkeep. In dramatic fashion, he turns to his merchant-father’s “God of Bargains” in an attempt to emulate the fame of Mozart (19). Originally placed upon the church wall by

Legnano tradesmen, the image of the “God of Bargains” assumes a distinct significance for the young Salieri. His desire for great talent closely resembles Marx’ notions of the transformative power of money, in which wealth holds the power to modify for better or for worse the natural state of humans (Marx 61). In other words, money can transform and corrupt the individual beyond recognition.

However, there is an initial distinction between Salieri and those distorted by money. It is not simple monetary wealth that Salieri seeks for himself but wealth of music. Moreover, one must reinterpret the altering power of money under a new concept called transformative music. For Salieri, money becomes a consequence of his musical transformation. In the play, Salieri believes that God has granted his wishes. However,

Salieri’s “God of Bargains” suggests a new economic function: his Faustian bargain with the “merchant” god exemplifies a metaphor for the pursuit of industry. In this light, the

“God of Bargains” is instead the “Materialist God,” granting access to material opportunity. The materialist God also embodies varying material embellishments of industry in the sense that, through music, Salieri rises in class and stature, as well as achieving financial and social prosperity. Therefore, the bargain scene conveys two ideas about virtue and industry. First, Salieri’s sincerely believes that God would bargain with humans for material gain. Second, Salieri’s need to attain the talent necessary to create music suggests the transformative power it holds, paralleling that of money. In this

Salieri heavily invests, internalizing piety and morals but of servitude to God and to the art of music-making.

When Salieri reaches agreement with the “God of Bargains,” he has fulfilled a conscious need for musical wealth and above all, musical transformation, fame being its climax. His musical desire then suggests a direct ideological correlation to financial security and social progress taken from industry. One cannot deny Salieri’s loss of faith as he battles against the absurd hegemony of God. The play’s philosophical questions about Salieri’s relationship to music and God should not distract from his penchant for musical competition. As stated early, Salieri’s lifestyle in Amadeus has strong overtones of aristocratic exuberance, increasingly visualized in the film, with scenes of his baroque- rococo styled living quarters, his personal access to an ornate carriage service, and his access to the balcony seats of the National Theatre demonstrating parallels to Voltaire’s need for industry. Because of his musical success, more and more luxuries come into

Salieri’s possession. He is both Voltaire’s producer and consumer of the city’s wealth. He is most civilized with luxurious possessions, the signs of pomp and exuberance.

Primarily, because of his level of production, Salieri receives greater recognition from

Joseph II’s court. His taste for aristocratic life, from the access he gains to the most pleasing of delicacies, is the consequence of cultural production.

Consequently, Salieri’s underlying appreciation for music encourages further investigation into the industrious transmission of ideas and values within the Vienna of

Amadeus. There are scenes in the play that are suggestive of Voltaire’s notion of industry and pleasure in relation to the social actors of Salieri’s environment. Like Salieri, the

spendthrift aristocrat who, through the consumption of cultural and pleasurable pursuits,

improves the state of the lower classes by forging industrial opportunities. Voltaire

believes that this existence expands taste and cultural norms to all classes, promotes

social mobility and enhances the “art of civilization” (Schorske 39). Thus, under this

interpretation, the city embodies the virtues necessary to progressive civilization. How

then did these virtues within society shape the cultural production of Amadeus’ Vienna?

As such, the trajectory of Salieri’s success in Amadeus intersects Voltaire’s beliefs about

industry, social mobility and pleasure production.

Historically, Joseph II’s authority transpired in a similar fashion. His form of

authority, especially in the production of music, is somewhat transparent in the play. He

took personal interest in all aspects of government, but he enjoyed most matters

pertaining to the musical arts (Brown 60; Beatles 95-6). In his article, “Amadeus and

Mozart: Setting the Record Straight,” Peter Brown describes the emperor as a learned listener and practitioner of music, of the “highest order,” attending to and participating

directly in Viennese music circles and theatres (53). The portrayal of a bumbling and

inept emperor uncaring of the cultural tastes distorts the court’s historic relationship to

Vienna’s music milieu. The musicologist John Rice adds in his study, Salieri and the

Viennese Opera, the emperor’s musical sophistication extended beyond its enjoyment in

several manners, including his preference for comedic opera to tragic opera, to the

patronage of various composers and the commissioning of projects and their premieres at

the National Theatre (459-60). These facts are crucial to understanding the power of the

emperor in the drama. To this end, the artists of eighteenth-century Vienna were

30 primarily artisans. Being premier artists of their time, Salieri and Mozart designed the structure and content of their music in a way that pleased the highest order.

In addition to his keen interest in music, the emperor took care to prevent any composer from monopolizing the court patronage of new operas. He belonged to high culture, endeared to the Viennese Italian School of music and opera. Pierre Bourdieu discusses the social alignment to aspects of culture belonging to a specific cultural class, which acts and behaves under certain linguistic and sociological parameters. Dorothea

Link reminds us in her work, “Vienna’s Private Theatrical and Musical Life,” that the crown and increasingly, the nobility, favored Italian opera of that era (223). Therein lies the guised contradictory nature of Amadeus’ Joseph II. A creature of high culture and its favoring of “Italian” art, the emperor nevertheless sought to diffuse operatic taste to the lower classes by supporting Singspiel, the German language operatic style which, according to Link, was admired historically by the Viennese “middle” and lower class in the city’s press (215). In Act I of Amadeus, the Emperor commissions an opera from

Mozart, who alerts the court of his intention to compose the music of Die Entführung aus dem Serail with a German libretto instead of a traditional Italian one. It marked the formation of Josephs II’s state sponsored Singspiel, a genre of German-centric opera that lasted until 1783, an attempt to introduce German character into the lofty art of opera

(Link 215). Mozart chooses a Turkish harem as the setting, an unconventional one for the court in the play because his aesthetic lies beyond the boundaries of their cultural class:

“I want to do a piece about real people… And I want to set it in a real place! A boudoir! – because that to me is the most exciting place on earth…I want life. Not boring legends!”

(71). For the court, its counts, and nobles, Italian style opera represents the highest art of

their cultural class. Turning again to Link, she explains that Singspiel was culturally

anathema to Vienna’s nobility. That Count Rosenberg and Salieri fought against the

unusual choice of language and setting for the opera in the Welcome March scene

becomes a display of two opposing transmissions of culture, one ingrained in cultural

tradition, the other promoting radical musical innovation.

Unlike the aristocracy and royal court, there is no evidence to support that

ordinary Viennese entertained a mastery of Italian opera. If one is to believe Link’s

documentation, then their reception of German language opera was unlike that of the

emperor and the aristocracy. In Act II Mozart’s invites Salieri to his premier of Die

Zauberflote: “Would you come truly? The Theatre isn’t grand. It’s just a popular Music

Hall. No one from the court will be there” (99). The audience of Mozart’s premier

reflects the ordinary character of the simple, poorer German Viennese. As part of this

audience, Salieri complains of the “smell and sweat of sausage” of this ordinary German crowd (99). Their reception was rowdy, boisterous, and carnivalesque, unlike the reserved, conservative highbrow audiences in earlier scenes. In the film adaptation, the

music hall in which Mozart stages a production of Die Zauberflote is grimy, murky, and

congested; the sight of children and their families in plain clothes suggests the cultural

and economic contrasts between classes. Though Mozart produced Die Zauberflote years

after popular reception of Singspiel waned, Salieri’s description of the German crowd is

indicative of Joseph’s legacy to transmit German style art to German-speaking Austrians.

Whether this form of transmission was successful is irrelevant. What is relevant about

32 this approach is the attempt by Joseph II to foster another cultural ideology that Mozart exploited twice in the play, in composing Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die

Zauberflote.

Throughout the play, Mozart is brazen, licentious, and scatological, but above all,

German, like the German-speaking audience of his art. The similarity, though problematic considering Mozart’s penchant for taste and pleasure, distinguishes two realities about the transmission and industry of his art. First, Salieri’s holds the competitive edge, willing to cater to these tastes of his cultural class. Salieri’s incredulity about Mozart’s musical prowess brings to light the financial and cultural professionalism determined by the virtues of the royal court and the nobility, the needs of the noble patron, the abilities of the artist, and undermining of popular taste. As Salieri comments,

“I would not need to plot too hard against his operas in future. The Viennese could be relied upon to destroy those for me” (84). In the play, Joseph II is the chief patron in the play. His patronage encouraged Salieri and Mozart to produce an astonishing high quality of music for a variety of audiences. However, it fell upon the nobility – his society – to mediate art’s value. They valued Baroque and Renaissance themes such as Absolute

Beauty and Greek and Roman lore, predominantly portrayed in absolute terms. As the mediators of culture, they were responsible for its transmission. This type of mediation of the arts suggests a microcosmic process of industrious and cultural activity in Vienna influenced by macro forces. The industry of music is thus the embodiment of a nexus of human activity and urban space negotiated by the wealthy, consisting of relationships between patrons, artists, spectators, and theatres. Mozart’s financial troubles allude to a

33 failure to compete against the monopoly of art mediation, when Mozart says, “I have no money, and no prospect of any” (87). In this regard, Salieri was better acclimated with

Viennese aristocratic taste and indeed, he prospered financially, while Mozart faltered because he would not do so. Mozart with few artistic supporters and patrons turns to new audiences – poorer Austrians – to substantiate his art. It is similar to an entrepreneur expanding his industry to new markets for monetary gain, the distinction being that

Mozart employs the transformative power of music, resonating with the cultural transmissions of Schorske’s model of urban virtue. In this state, music transmits progressive ideology through state-sponsored German opera. Mozart’s insistence upon

German librettos allowed poorer Austrians, who did not understand Italian, to enjoy his high art, though attained at a financial cost, in the play, considering he receives little for it. Nevertheless, the transmission correlates with Voltaire’s notion that an urban relationship between high and low classes, mediated by the creation and consumption of cultural industries, however inconsistent and problematic it was for the artist.

Vienna’s wealthier sectors granted the city a uniquely cultural milieu of music, a patronage that benefited the middle and lower classes of Vienna. In the play, music in the age of urban industry becomes the civilizing ingredient readily consumed by its musically inclined denizens. The musical city lent ears to the dramatic dichotomy of musicians: one represented by Salieri’s industry and the other by Mozart’s German principles. At its best, Vienna’s musical sector lent itself to the multi-dimensional urban narrative of virtue, illuminating the economic and cultural progress of Vienna. The characters Salieri and Mozart of Amadeus provide an illustration of urban virtue with historical relevance.

Using Schorske’s evaluation of Voltaire’s ideas of the city, the chapter has provided a

general presentation of urban virtue produced by the emergence and reliance upon

industry, pleasure, and even Germanic idealism. These fragments of historical relevancy

denote a conscious and urban interaction of ideas, music, industry, and competition in an exceptional city.

35 CHAPTER 3

CITY AS VICE

The Vienna of Amadeus expresses elements of urban virtue in Antonio Salieri’s and Wolfgang Mozart’s relationship to music, the industry of music in Vienna, and the city’s ability to foster these developments. The notions of pleasure, industry, diffusion of culture and social mobility reveal in Amadeus the existence of substantial historical relationships between the city, humans, and culture. In this light, the first act of the play contains historical character in that the protagonist’s virtues relate to the conditions of the virtuous city.

However, Salieri’s dramatic transformation in Amadeus by the second Act, particularly after he vows to do battle with both God and his instrument, Mozart, sufficiently undermines virtue as the sole defining aspect of Vienna in the play. As

Salieri’s relationship to music and Mozart’s genius deepens with jealousy and competitive fervor by the end of the first Act, one must then consider then the corruption and vice it produces. It is at once absurd and tragic. Furthermore, the introduction of

Mozart ensures the complete transformation of urban meaning. Though his arrival and the professional journey thereafter become tenets of the Enlightenment’s disruption of traditional court and aristocratic structures in the form of social mobility and cultural diffusion, he also manages to undermine the crumbling world of reason and order that belong to Salieri and the city and bring about the transfer of virtue to other nonurban realms. Therefore, to create the image of the city in the midst of transformation and to

36 introduce its antithesis, the trajectory of this chapter turns to the second urban evaluation, the “city as vice.” While Voltaire pressed for urban exceptionalism, others detracted from his positivism and pointed to the city’s darker side, Schorske explains. New criticisms put

into question the moral imperatives of the spendthrift aristocracy and industrious lower

classes that bore the fruit of civilization. Instead, the architects of these pleasure and

cultural-bound industries in the city represented a monopoly of decay and immorality that

gave little and suffocated those willing to compete against it. Furthermore, they countered

with the idea that the city in many ways was inhumanly inhospitable and deeply

destructive in contrast to the previous thought of social progress. For example, Schorske

mentions English writer Oliver Goldsmith, who viewed with alarm the corruption of

those who greedily hoarded the city’s wealth. It is true that the nobility lived lavishly,

hosting festivities and musical performances in Roman courtyards and Baroque palaces,

in complete contrast to the filthy and deplorable streets and suburbs of Paris, London, and

Vienna, indicative of an inequality of wealth persistent within the lowest classes. In

addition, Mercier de la Riviera in particular held what Schorske assumes to be a scathing

rebuttal to Voltaire’s own sense of progressive and urban virtue, stating that the urban

nobility carelessly trampled the poor in their wake, physically and economically (Mercier

43). Such sentiments against the city’s ruling structure, financially and politically,

parallel to those preconditions of the French Revolution. The French Third Estate, after years of heavy taxation and plague, sought equality in social, political, and economic terms and rose in violent and bloody revolt against the Second and First Estates in

France. Thus, the plight of the poor, both peasant and city dweller, was used as an

37 argument against the ideology of cities embellished with aristocrat and court-centric

ideology. Moreover, these anti-urban conceptions meant to forego the idea of the

“virtuous city,” and in its place illustrate the image of a subdued, denigrated, and

trampled city initiated by the vice of richer, wealthier men. It is the image of the proto-

industrial city in the infancy of decay, indicative of social-economic transformations in

late eighteenth-century Europe when it came to grips with the coming of the Industrial

Revolution. That is not to say that the ghost of the Industrial Revolution appears in

Amadeus. What is relevant is the idea that vice, in the context of anti-urban thought,

defines the primary conflict between two composers as a description of the city’s flight

from progress to stagnation and inequality. They are the early signs of Romanticism

forming within the character of Mozart as the evidence against urban exceptionalism. The rationality and virtue of the city metamorphosed to depressed but orderly states of being,

the consequence of industrial accumulation of wealth and culture that destroyed the allure of optimistic social mobility and enslaved humans under the shackles of factories, mills and textiles. Thus, Western thought turned away from the city and discovered the beauty of nature as preferable to the “grime” and “brick” of the city (Schorske 44). Human salvation would coalesce in the countryside and hinterland outsides city boundaries and natural emotionality would replace the stoic rationality of humans and gods. The cult of the city gave way to the cult of nature.

Furthermore, Schorske described other notions of pre-industrial anti-urbanism

countercurrent to urban virtue. They include feelings of social alienation by intellectuals.

As Rousseau had suggested and Linquet, a critic of the philosophes, had readily accepted,

38 the Enlightenment itself did not originate in mass society but in fact found its strongest

voices among bourgeois and aristocratic circles (9). This truth about the Enlightenment

thus alludes to the necessity to create distinctions from within the play Amadeus. It

necessitates a social and cultural distinction between the protagonists Salieri and Mozart.

Though Salieri comes from a humble upbringing, throughout the play he prefers

aristocratic taste and cultural order of Vienna. Mozart, on the opposite end, and from

humble beginnings transcends the boundaries set by Salieri and Viennese court culture.

On one hand, he shares affinities with Salieri’s cultural tastes. On the other hand, his

approaches to art display a radicalization of motifs, subjects, and ideas deemed base,

absurd and chaotic by his peers, such as staging the background of one opera in a

boudoir. He may be considered closer in spirit to Mercier and Goldsmith, representing

the absurdity and conventionality he discovered in the Vienna of his time and put to

question of the feasibility of the city representing anything but virtue.

Moreover, the rise of pleasure and wealth had adverse effects in the city: the degradation of life due to the rise of inequality, immorality, poverty, and conflict. In this degradation also came the decay of the city’s ability to produce and contain those virtuous feats mentioned in the previous chapter. Moreover, if one considers from

Amadeus Salieri’s descent from virtue to immorality, then the notion of vice is relevant to his and Mozart’s artistic competition. His course of action between the acts will reveal two social processes evoked by their rivalry: the protection of their craft and their competitive and brutal elucidation of Salieri’s musical mediocrity relative to Mozart’s financial one by any means possible. The two urban processes serve as the foundation

39 from which to identify the extent of vice in the play’s loudest voices. Salieri’s gradual

dramatic turn from social virtue conveys the powerful effect of self-transformation,

controlling not only his taste for social and cultural stability but igniting fervent vice. His

zealous competitive abilities, despite Mozart’s superior talents, endorse the

indiscriminate slander of competition against the creative and radical opponent. Salieri’s success is rather the collaborative energy of two monopolizing structures: culture and identity. Mozart’s own competitive energies do not rival Salieri’s material triumphs, as he embodies the spirit of those outside or disenchanted with the nobility’s and crown’s monopoly on culture transmission.

The presence of these two groups, of these ideological worlds, undergoes a sort of revolutionary conflict in Amadeus, which the tragic competition between Salieri and

Mozart symbolizes. But it is Mozart’s radical vision that undermines the traditional order that Salieri defends through vice. The vice he nurtures transforms Vienna in the play from the amicable “City of Musicians” (111) to the disdainful “City of Slander” (16) and

“City of Scandals” (113), very different from Voltaire’s exalted city.

Then, let us consider these two conceptions of Vienna in the play, which occur in

the play anachronistically. The first conception, which he mentions near the end of the

drama, conveys the musical and cultural pragmatism of Vienna, an aspect so important to his fame. With its National Theatre and smaller commercial theaters and public music halls, and an aristocratic, ecclesiastical, princely, and upper bourgeois patronage, Vienna was a lure for artists (Wuthnow 289). As such, Viennese royal patronage conveyed the

mercantile practice of providing state resources to promote the arts (Wuthnow 166). The

40 cultural production of music in eighteenth-century Vienna follows the western growth of

artistic production as an urban modern phenomenon. Access to theatres and music halls

only exacerbated the competitive forces within theatre and opera in eighteenth-century

Vienna. Once can sense Voltaire’s mobile and cultural diffused urban center taken hold

in Vienna. Prominent theatres such as the Burgtheater, as well as German Singspiel and

Italian Hofoper companies, received subsidies directly from the crown and aristocracy

(Link 231). Lewis Mumford referred to this state patronage of the arts as an attempt to

embody state ideology within art (354). Under such state auspices, Viennese arts represented the political aims of the royal court and the cultural taste of its nobility, but also opened the doors of art and culture to the rest of society.

Under these conditions, Salieri is entirely committed to the birth and transmission

of Italian opera, the highest order of music in Vienna of his time. In this regard, Salieri is

a creature of his cultural environment. He is Italian and trained in Italian musical and operatic aesthetics, art which the Viennese nobility desired most (Braunbehrens 165,

189). That he rises in stature through music parallels Voltaire’s previous notions of social mobility produced by the spread of industry and pleasure. Through music, Salieri himself initiates industry and pleasure, joining the aristocracy, crown and their lower class emulators as a mediators and consumers of culture.

Nevertheless, it is necessary that we bypass the idea of industry for now, and focus the attention upon Salieri’s musical competition against Mozart. Music, or music- making alone does not warrant the label of vice. This also does not mean to suggest the act of music production is free from direct manipulation. It is rather a means to an end.

41 As mentioned in the previous chapter Salieri recounts his successful bargain with the

“God of Bargains,” which originates from his childhood dream “to blaze like a comet,

across the firmament of Europe” (18). He spoke rather to an aestheticized god, the deity

of music, the patron god Dionysus: “Grant me sufficient time to enjoy it [fame]. In return,

I will strive to better the lot of my fellows. And I will honor You with much music all the

days of my life!” (19). Before meeting Mozart, Salieri is chaste and charitable. He

refrains from sleeping with his pupils and financially supports poorer musicians in

Vienna. For a time, at least in his mind, Salieri prospered musically, morally and

culturally. He thought he had struck a bargain with an Apollonian god, one that is just,

virtuous and moral. Music became his source of fame and prestige, a duo of social

accomplishments that brought him close to the aristocracy and crown. As he emulated

their culture, he too cultivated their pleasures and taste in music and culture. In the play,

Count Rosenberg, Count Van Swieten, Count Von Strack, and the Emperor, Joseph II,

are representative of the accepted culture. They were as instrumental as Salieri in maintaining the status quo, the status quo symbolizing the “City of Musicians.” It remained as such so long as these individuals mediated the transmission and consumption of their industrious culture, restricted to their aesthetics, their wealth and their manners.

When Salieri acknowledges the superiority of Mozart’s music before admitting

defeat, he is reminded of his inferiority in music. More importantly, it symbolizes the

Aristotelian concept of recognition, in which Mozart’s music marks the transfer from

ignorance to knowledge. He says, “I fought with God through his preferred Creature –

Mozart, named Amadeus. In the waging of which, of course, the Creature had to be

42 destroyed” (63). Salieri will conduct a treacherous and evil competition against his rival and God, not for the sake of music, but to substantiate his cultural and financial accomplishments in the ordered sense. However, to wage his conflict, Salieri will access the Id to negate the pain and frustration caused by the collapsing idealized world.

Internally, Salieri undergoes reinvention in a fit of frustration, shifts away from the

Superego, and instead plays upon his baser needs and desires for revenge– the will to avenge the notoriety and superiority he had enjoyed – regardless of the suffering he will cause Mozart. In Aristotelian terms, this is the play’s reversal within Salieri. This is also the first sign of his vice. The reversal to vice marks the shift from “City of Musicians” to the “City of Slander” and “Scandal” of which vice, not morality or virtue, shall define

Vienna.

By this point, Salieri has enjoyed consistent success: “Already a prolific composer to the Austrian Court, I own a respectable house and a respectable wife” (20). The

Emperor and Viennese nobles revered the operas and concerts. However, Salieri’s encounter with Mozart in the Library of Baroness Waldstadten in Act 1 is unsettling. He happens upon a young man with a scatological mouth, perverse behavior, and immaturity that Salieri believes is ill suited for God’s favor. On hearing Mozart’s Adagio for the

Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments K.361 through the halls of the Countess’ library,

Salieri feels torn and betrayed. He cries, “What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it your need?” (Amadeus 30). Salieri reprimands God for allowing such a baseman to become the conduit of fine and eminent art. Unlike Salieri’s music that abides by the

43 conventions of the aristocratic cultural class, Mozart’s musical structures and motifs are radical, unruly and instinctive. Given this distinction of personality, Plunka and

Gianakaris believe that Salieri and Mozart symbolize the dichotomous Apollonian-

Dionysian complex (182, 119). Their behaviors relate to the Freudian mediation of the psyche, in which the Ego mediates between the Superego (ethics, morality, order) and the

Id (primordial, instinctive), arriving at outcomes aligned with reality. Salieri unknowingly negotiates with an instinctive, impulsive, and energetic opponent with musical superiority regardless of his undesirable instincts and desires. In other words,

Salieri’s conservatism displays characteristics belonging to the idealized Superego and

Mozart’s radicalism to the Id. Yet, if one is to consider the theme of Romanticism within urban vice, then Mozart’s Id-like qualities offer its direct link. More than anything,

Mozart’s art and behavior are aesthetic opponents to the order and reason that rewards

Salieri. As such, he calculates Mozart’s chaotic genius as the avant-garde reaction to his ordered world and in response, the malicious treatment of Mozart’s production illuminates the dark transformation of a city that has lost its moral sense and its virtue.

The result favorably paints Mozart among the tableaus of Romanticism, adopting those motifs of emotionality and primordial experience as converging in nature, far outside the material constraints of the once virtuous city.

In his article, “Amadeus: Shaffer’s Supreme Achievement,” Gianakaris describes

Mozart as an anomaly in Salieri’s orderly universal world (120). Let us then refer to this world as Italian, conventional, and aristocratic. In this regard, one can think of Mozart as its disruption. The disruption of Vienna’s musical and cultural order. Initially, Salieri

44 approaches Mozart with attentive suspicion and fascination: “Suddenly I felt immensely cheered! I would seek him out and welcome him myself to Vienna” (32). Their meeting in the Welcoming March Scene, which involves Joseph II and members of his court at

Schönbrunn Palace, only justifies Salieri’s intolerance, with Mozart displaying arrogance for his craft and a radical disregard for their taste and sensibilities. He successfully sells his idea for a new opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serial, to the emperor, earning the royal commission outright. Though the opera’s silhouette is controversially set in a

Turkish harem, Mozart convinces the emperor to fund it by appealing to his German sensibilities, in opposition to those Italophiles of the court, Rosenberg and Salieri. The attempt by Mozart to improve his musical profile in Joseph’s court proves competitively suffocating to Salieri and again he reminds the audience of his vice: “Was it then – so early – that I began to have thoughts of murder?. . .Of course not: at least not in Life. In

Art it was a different matter… In reality, the man was in no danger from me at all… Not yet” (Amadeus, 39). Salieri’s plot is sinister in its intent, but the approach requires explanation. He has given murder consideration, but he has also transformed the plot into an artistic one, in which he desires Mozart’s art to be made irrelevant. Therefore, artistic irrelevancy, particularly the fate of Mozart, exemplifies Salieri’s competitive aims.

Nevertheless, the art of Mozart was far from irrelevant. Salieri would agree. In addition, the unconventional musical aesthetic of Mozart, the spiritual and artistic representation of

Dionysus, patron god of art, are the coming winds of change, as God through Mozart, returns to the Romantic natural realm. In this light Salieri wishes to reduce the influence of a man and god to save the virtuous city, a contradictory approach that combines the

45 humanistic and the inhumane through which he simultaneously strives to decenter God from his highest moral perch and undermine the radical and absurdity of Mozart’s human personality by resorting to malice and treachery.

The reduction of the city first begins with marginalization. The language that

Salieri employs to describe his conflict against Mozart and Mozart himself – the negativity of waging, creature and destroyed - conveys the negative and intentional reduction of Mozart’s musical essence. Therefore, the antagonism against Mozart’s otherness resembles the existential concept of the other. From the start of the play, Salieri defines his essence through the prism of music and God. Mozart’s arrival limits Salieri’s perspective, focusing solely upon the young composer from Salzburg. The points of comparison vary from moral to professional qualities. However, Salieri’s immoral reduction of Mozart’s person conveys the obvious use of the concept of the other.

Otherness, thus, displays the differences between humans in varying degrees. In the play,

Mozart’s otherness threatens the cultural structure that Salieri deems to protect. This form of marginalization has its place in the city, in which classes and cultures come into conflict, at times with negative outcomes. That Voltaire valued the cultural communicative aspects of the city attributed to cultural transmission seems idiosyncratic and homogenized. This interpretation is not an argument that renders the city immorally corrupt. Rather, Salieri’s treatment of Mozart in their unspoken musical competition exemplifies the corruption of human-by-human in moments of aesthetic conflict, all at once encapsulated in the city.

46 Nevertheless, Salieri believes that Mozart is no representation of humanity, much

less of divinity. Rather he is an immoral creature-human chosen by an equally absurd

God to undermine the pious and righteous humans. The moral and metaphysical conflict

only exists in Salieri’s mind and as narrator; his delusions are a detriment to the

understanding of otherness, competition and art, mediated by their conflict. Though

Salieri commanded the loyalty of music aficionados in the courts and palaces, by the time

of Mozart’s arrival, ironically, these same men from Salieri’s cultural class introduce

some sense of equal opportunity within the rivalry. Men like the emperor, and Baron Von

Sweeten, are intrigued by Mozart’s freshness and possibly by his willingness to infuse art

with German ideology. Even Salieri was enchanted by Mozart’s prowess. This openness

to competition among the composers remains intact during the play, evident of Joseph’s

commissioning Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serial in spite of Salieri’s and

Rosenberg’s pleas. The court grants him the opportunity to realize his radical visions for opera.

Given Mozart’s initial success for an audience, however, Volkmar Braubehrens

makes mention of a paradoxical relationship that existed between Vienna and its artists.

While he argues that no other city in German- speaking Europe valued music more than

Vienna, its saturation of musicians also had no other rival. Incidentally, the sheer number

of musicians vying for patronage meant lower wages and fewer musical opportunities

(Braunbehrens 130). The expansion of the bourgeois economy caused by the reformist

efforts of Joseph II in this era had created economic opportunities for the rising Viennese

bourgeois (Freudenberger 342). However, their profits were too little to provide greater

47 support for all Viennese musicians, as Dorothea Link has also argued (231). However,

Salieri gains financial and culturally in his production of music in both acts, his

admonishment of Mozart for pursuing royal favor suggests Salieri is simultaneously

bound to the permanent chain of patronage, commodity (his music), and consumption.

Salieri’s production of music, particularly operas commissioned by the royal court, allowed him to flourish in Viennese aristocratic circles, his relationship with Rosenberg and Strack being exemplary. With every production, his fame grows, and the recognition

of his work by the court and aristocracy ensures space for production. Mozart’s talents

repeatedly threaten Salieri’s capacity for opportunity, as evident in Joseph and Van

Swieten’s turn to Mozart, as well as Mozart’s capacity for new productions.

Under this type of state consolidation of art in the urban space, the creation of

artistic experiences exacerbated the potential for competition between artists vying for

space, however ruinous and deplorable the effects were upon competitors. These dangers

increased in the urbanized and industrialized city. The continued threat of Mozart’s

masterful quality of product, which only Salieri’s truly acknowledges, encourages Salieri

to partake in slander and scandal. They are not only competing in the artistic sense or

instead vying for opportunities defined by aristocratic and royal patronage. They are in fact vying for the heart of humanity through art, whether ordered or primordial. Yet, this is the schism between Schorske’s competing urban concepts of virtue and vice which

Salieri and Mozart come to embody, respectively.

Through awareness, Salieri was capable of producing a musical product that

afforded him cultural stature. He manipulates his power as court composer to better his

48 lot and to damage Mozart’s capacities. Initially, his court influence sabotages Mozart’s work by intentionally withdrawing positive praise due to him, culminating in front of

Joseph II and other members of the court. “But if the Public does not like one’s work, one has to accept that fact” (Amadeus 83), Salieri says after a performance. Inasmuch, Salieri manipulates Joseph II into denying Mozart lucrative posts. On the other hand, this marks the failure of Joseph II and the Viennese to appreciate Mozart’s proto-Romantic genius or identify the transformative powers of the industrial city, as emotionless order blends with industrious apathy. For example, Salieri singlehandedly limits the repetition of performances of Mozart’s operas - in Forman’s cinematic adaptation Salieri admits to using his influence to limit Don Giovanni to only nine performances in Vienna while in the play the opera The Marriage of Figaro premiered fewer times. His vice went further.

By the end of the play, destitute and dying Mozart encounters a disguised black figure at his residence’s door, and driven by fear, he agrees to compose a requiem mass for the mysterious figure. Quite the perverse man, Salieri uses the dreary black figure to mortify

Mozart into composing one last musical work, indirectly causing his premature death.

However, in the cinematic adaptation, Salieri’s disguises himself as a Janus-cloaked figure and implores from Mozart a requiem mass. His deception conveys the patron-artist relationship desirable in art. As the man behind the black figure, resembling the

Commendatore of Don Giovanni and Leopold’s Janus-faced costume as seen in the film,

Salieri manipulates Mozart’s desperation for coin. Unfortunately, for Mozart, much the naïve and visionary artist, he refused to bend to the will of the audience, much less to his court patrons. Instead, he ignored cultural convention to bring about music that

49 transcended the aesthetics of his period. He took contemporary Viennese and Italian

Opera and infused it with fresh innovation. The ordered and pragmatic opera of the city lost its appeal; it was the start of Romanticism in Vienna.

Ultimately, Mozart lacks the immoral cunning, the social support of the dominant cultural class, and the willingness to conform his art to conventional taste to survive

Salieri’s attacks. Like the French Impressionists of late nineteenth-century, the Viennese pubic overlooked Mozart’s genius. Salieri says, “Obviously, I would not need to plot too hard against his operas in the future. The Viennese could be relied upon to destroy those for me” (Amadeus 84). Salieri’s success with the Viennese public illustrates two characteristics about urban social composition. First, the Viennese public represents two cultural groups, the first being court and aristocracy and the second being commoners and ordinary people. By the end of the play, Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflote premiered to the latter group, while Salieri’s art mesmerizes the former. Mozart receives little compensation for his opera, as evident from the lackluster première of Die Zauberflote, which earns less than half of the opera’s performance receipts. In addition, his productions of Le Nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflote alienated Rosenberg and other patrons. He was “shunned by all men of influence” (Amadeus 103), leaving him without state and aristocratic patrons. In the spirit of Mercier, Mozart resembles both the man outclassed by the culturally entrenched Salieri and the lower class emulating and advancing vis-á-vis social mobility. His musical products were far superior to Salieri’s production, a truth Salieri never questioned nor denied. Nevertheless, by accepting

Salieri’s product as superior, the city indirectly facilitated the value of competition

50 without giving thought to quality, fairness, genius or innovation. Powerful Viennese patrons, those mediators of industry, ultimately shunned that Mozart and culture proliferates the new condition of the city, in which the competitive victory may undermine the immoral processes of competition and innovation and creativity subdued.

Moreover, the conclusion of their rivalry thus transposes human conflict as an innate occurrence between artists in socially stratified cities, suggesting that opposing competitive forces may potentially accept vice as a path to victory, though these terms are entirely subjective and relative. This assertion is not a new one. Vicious and sinister competition is manifest in all stages of human evolution, within social groups, between social groups, cultures, kingdoms, and nations. The clashes of ideology, taste, class, industry, and labor are inevitable in a city embellished with wealth, culture, and faith.

This very conflict alters the spirit of the city. For example, Salieri’s initial belief in God echoes the conceptual virtue of St. Augustine who in his theological work, City of God, sought to fashion the human city upon the spirit of God. Salieri’s denunciation of God by the second act is proof that conflict allowed modern man to shift away from God’s city.

As we have seen in Amadeus, Vienna conveys the problematic image of dichotomous existences, of a decentralized city capable of having varying degrees of virtue and vice. If

Salieri’s actions, including those of the cultural peers who assisted him, can serve as a barometer of urban morality, then one can deduce that his vice, as the means to victorious competition, becomes the corrupted condition of the new imagined city. Such an evaluation of the city renders individuals and groups in conflict the possibility of attaining virtue in the city.

51 In this light, the city as vice elicits more than the specter of degradation. It touches upon the deepest conditions of human complexity. In the scope of events,

Salieri’s utter destruction of Mozart brings to light an underlying consequence invoked in the campaign towards fulfillment: the rejection of mediocrity. One can decipher this rejection as the obvious defensive mechanism of an insecure character undone by superior personas. Before the arrival of Mozart to Vienna, Salieri had savored his fame and success. Mozart’s arrival instantaneously put into question Salieri’s musical exceptionalism. The uncertainty extends to him and to the audience. Scholars of Shaffer’s work have noted Salieri’s brush with insecurity. Katherine Arenas asserts that Salieri is talented, but second-rate in comparison to Mozart. Instead, he finds substantial meaning in the Christian work ethic and its intuitive rewards (164). Peter Plunka places Salieri in a sociological context, arguing that the protagonist represents a socio-conservative aggressor, reacting to another’s primitive radicalism. In other words, as the cities adopt new models of culture and industry it is natural that tradition oppose modernity, the present generation oppose future generations. Werner Huber and Hubert Zap come closer to identifying this shift in question, adding that Amadeus expresses a reoccurring motif in

Peter Shaffer’s plays: the dualist structuring of the sensibility of passion and mediocrity, represented by Salieri, against radical genius, represented by Mozart (304). Thus, one can interpret Salieri’s turn to vice as the welcoming of the triumph of mediocrity against the evolution of progressive and radical urban virtue. Interestingly enough, the mention of dualist concepts, of mediocrity against genius, illustrates the transformative context of the rivalry.

52 Another method of analyzing this duality lies in Marxist theory of transformative materialism, particularly the vice invoked by the industry of pleasure. Up to this point in the chapter, there is no mention of the influence of money upon Salieri and Mozart.

Under Marxist thought there exists the supposed link between being and illusion. In his

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: The Power of Money, Marx identifies the omnipotent powers of money on individuals in market societies. He argued that possessing and transacting with money is the bond shared between humans, objects, pleasure, and gratification. Money or wealth affords the individual the possibility to transcend his or her mediocre or unwanted state. The transformative power of money in this regard parallels the power of Mephistopheles, the demon from Goethe’s Faust who altered essences in exchange for human souls. For example, the “ugly” individual can become beautiful by using wealth to marry a beautiful woman (Marx 61). In the play, music and all its pleasures embodies the transformative “power of money.” As Huber and

Zap have argued, Salieri uses music to ensure his transition from mediocrity to fame in

Vienna’s musical world. The transformation from merchant’s son to composer is one sign of money’s characterization within music, once attained, Salieri: “burned with unquenchable flame” (21). What he felt was the pleasure of transformation. However,

Mozart’s true genius undoes the effect of transformation, reducing Salieri to mediocrity, a process that Marx describes as the nullification of illusionary images. The sense of illusion is not lost on Salieri: “We [composers] took unremarkable men: usual bankers, run of the mill priests, ordinary soldiers and statesmen and wives – and sacramentalised their mediocrity” (21). Yet, the nullification of his own image is surreal. In this sense,

53 Salieri had utilized music to supplant his self-diagnosed mediocrity, a masking of psychological insecurities rooted within the overwhelming desire for self-transformation.

Without it the image of Salieri is bare and without signification. The insecure but ambitious image of a man such as Salieri, composer and servant to the royal court in

Vienna, will stop at nothing to protect and ensure his transcendence, no matter the cost.

From a strictly Marxist standpoint, the cost of these immoral interactions between the theatrical-historical personalities is great. Even the venticelli, the pseudo-narrative voice of the play, are attentive to the rivalry. Their attentiveness metaphorically acts as a bridge between Salieri, Mozart, vice, and the city. More paparazzi than journalists, they are greatly intrigued by the vice committed. To that end, vice fulfilled for Salieri grand dreams, an uncomfortable reality taken from the activity of court-patronized music. For him, the city symbolized the bizarre interplay of virtuous exceptionality and fateful mediocrity, mediated by the possibilities for either virtue and vice. In this very city,

Salieri could hope to remain the constant beacon of divine art and beauty, though the future of art will belong to the Romantics. Nevertheless, if the city allowed the conditions, moral or not, to foster his transformation from mediocre merchant’s son to prestigious court composer, in the spirit of social mobility, what prevents others from following suit? Mozart’s aura of radical genius confirms that such social mobility is achievable.

Nevertheless, virtuous stability is fleeting. It is equally true that social mobility on a mass scale expanded later in the nineteenth century. In this context, competition binds humans to social mobility, forcing parties to compete for cultural and industrial control of

54 the society. The German sociologist Georg Simmel once wrote that the process of competition among humans was not inherently evil. He claimed that the process exemplified “the struggle for attention and applause, for acceptance and devotion of every kind,” the result a sociological nexus of activity which bonds humans (962).

Competitors triumphed over the opponent through honest and fair work, the product of their work justly overcoming the inferior one. The whole of society would benefit from improved products, services or achievement. What began as the distinct performance of virtue, out of an honest attempt by Salieri to transcend his mediocre upbringing, could not withstand loss of exceptionalism: “If I cannot be Mozart then I do not wish to be anything…I will whisper my name to you: ‘Antonio Salieri: Patron Saint of

Mediocrities!” (113). Salieri’s will does negotiate fallacious identity with reality, the illusion of genius and the perils of mediocrity. Yet, the outcome illustrates the corrupted process of competition, which ultimately shifts the city to embody vice rather than virtue.

Treachery and illusion are Salieri’s competitive tools; his Id-like behavior switched intermittently with the Superego invited the program necessary to protect the double- consciousness of his art: popular, mediocre and out of fashion.

Much to the chagrin of just men and woman, Salieri proves that justice does not serve the realm of competition. Rather, the use of vice to his favor raises the question of just, pious and honorable competition. In Amadeus, the audience in a sense, both theatrical and literal, the former represented by the venticelli, witnesses this deliberate corruption of Simmel’s ideal. Though by 1823 audiences preferred Mozart’s music to

Salieri’s, the fact remains that Salieri unjustifiably negated the greater artist, the finer

55 creator, and the keeper of worthy product to meet an end that was selfish. Thus, Salieri represents the distinctive sign of destructive self- preservation and Mozart the martyr of innovation and progress, but from the city they had enjoined. In fact, the cultural classes they encounter in the climb through society, the comforts and pleasures and the competitive industry that cannibalizes unpopular or dissonant art, do not lend room to virtue. Competition, in its most vile form, is the means of Salieri’s preservation within the city. Anything less undermines his rise from rural and poor upbringing to the cultural heights he entertains, regardless of the mediocrity of his work. Anything more reduces

Mozart of the similar upbringing to undeserving irrelevancy. Therefore, when virtue no longer affords preservation, Salieri and culture as a whole cast it aside for vice and the city loses the heart of humanity.

Perhaps it is fitting for the protagonist Salieri to threaten the sanctity of the city with revulsions against change, against conventionality, against the superiority of the coming future, in a time in which the city promised woman and man a path to unbridled progress, rich with culture, industry and creativity. Salieri at the same rate provides the stark contrast of mediocrity and exceptionality. It may be the beating will of the faulty human condition to resist unknown ideals, particularly in the city inhabited by thousands of competing forces. More certain is the transformative strength of industrialization and the failure of Enlightenment paths of order and reason to regulate the former. Perhaps, humanity’s turn to nature, to emotions, to primordial experience, felt infinitely attractive to the grime and stone of William’s Blake’s London streets. With the death of Mozart at the hands of vice followed the demise of virtue as the city’s primary consciousness.

56 CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

The art of extracting historical meaning from a text oppositional to such tasks is no simple feat. Given that the play makes no claim to entertain historical accuracy, this paper has taken the tribulations of an otherwise modern rendition of a historical moment in Vienna and contemplated the meaning within the play’s characterizations to create an interpretation of a different magnitude. That the chaste and illustrious Salieri, blinded by jealousy and envy, destroys the prodigious Mozart is evident of a theme familiar to audiences of theatre. The dynamic suggests the unfinished and Orphic continuum of human tragedy. But by enlisting the ideas of Carl Schorske, this paper shifted from formalist and sociological case studies of the play, and instead compared the behaviors of

Salieri and Mozart in their dynamic relationships to music, culture, industry, and competition to the changing representations of the eighteenth and nineteenth city.

Turning to this historical framework of the eighteenth-century city and partly the nineteenth-century city, the comparison of virtue and vice as represented through Salieri and Mozart, Vienna too becomes comparable to the eventual shift from the ideal and progressive city of the eighteenth century to its deplorable form in the nineteenth century.

In other words, the paper intended to allow the convergence of art and history in particular fashion, withstanding the deliberate compulsions of the playwright’s artistic license. That the villain Salieri and his victim Mozart equivocally capture the characteristics of virtue and vice illustrates the ability of the text to surpass its intended

57 boundaries. Each representation of these men oscillates between complex conviction and petty fragility. The worlds they have built or tried to build become unlivable to a certain degree, as they succumb to the transformative conditions of competition within the realms of music, culture, and industry. As they near closer musical conflict, the production and transmission of music, Salieri and Mozart come to embody the virtuous and immoral extent of deeper human powers at play. In addition, the radical genius of

Mozart symbolizes the spread of Romanticism in its infancy. It is antithetical to the changing city under industrial transformation. At once, it disrupts the idea that progress and pleasure belonged solely to the city that set in motion the rise of the industrial revolution, an illusion to nineteenth-century Romantic transcendence not lost to the children of the early-nineteenth-century.

Their city, as Amadeus proves, is the immense boundary of human energy and consciousness, united in the particulars of culture, politics, and stratification, spouting forth societies of distinct character and magnitude. It is the cosmic backdrop to the music pursued by these men. Initially, elements of Shaffer’s Salieri and Mozart symbolize

Schorske’s idea for virtue as the city’s essence, qualities relevant to and apparent in the history of Hapsburg Vienna. As composers, Salieri and Mozart are limited to art production when compared to their cultural and noble peers who toil in larger cultural and societal projects. Yet, this paper intentionally expands their role as artists to encapsulate production of art and culture in its eclectic excesses and limitations.

Therefore, it is in the competition between both men and between city essences that the struggle of metaphysical, professional, and moral dimension manifests. By the end, their

58 ongoing competition degenerates, as does the value of the city. Salieri’s turn to vice, coupled with the death of Mozart, toasts to the coming of vice, decay, and immorality in cities throughout industrial Europe and the birth of Romanticism throughout Western

Europe. The outcome of Salieri’s and Mozart’s competition, in the scope of urban ponderings, lies in the undermining of the optimism presented by the city, as beacon of progress and virtue. Salieri’s turn to competitive evil represents the coming age of materialism, of financial, professional, and ideological success overtaking the exalted allure of progress through urban exceptionalism. By defeating Mozart, Salieri defeats the tradition of God as the lasting vestige of St. Augustine’s own idea for a godly city, thus forever supplanting God from the center of urban realms and allowing humans a seat. He in turns defeats the idea that cities encapsulate progress, industry, and human goodness as the true natural processes of civilization. Those men of the Enlightenment, Voltaire particularly, had envisioned the ascent of humanity to this seat, culminating fully in the city. Ultimately, materialism, the scientific and economic technologies and improvements of the industrial revolution outstrip the city’s idealized allure and the filth and pollution of industrialization denigrates urban Europe.

Thus, Salieri’s actions in the play transmit these coming developments to the audience, his vile actions in the second act undermine the progressive qualities of both men found in the first act. The spread of more populist institutions, the growth of financial money markets, and their influence upon social stratification shall maximize the ubiquity of competition in future societies. Salieri’s musical form of competition is but one obvious characteristic of the vice that Schorske describes in his evaluation of the

59 nineteenth-century city. It alludes to the maltreatment of humans given to their mediocre existence within factories, mills, butcheries, and production plants, the wanderers of dark industrial urban space, and victims of vampiric gang bosses, lords, owners, and competitors, antagonists driven by the promise of cultural, political, and economic stature, however mediocre and villainous themselves. The vice that Schorske associates with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city will force the future Romantics to the hinterlands of Europe, abandoning the city to the mechanisms of aloof industrial development. The Romantics, like Mozart, would look beyond the constraint of

Enlightenment ideologies to uncover the spirit of humanity elsewhere.

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