Amadeus Article-BBC

The beloved film of Mozart’s life and death triumphed at the Oscars 30 years ago. It distorts the truth but we are right to remember it as a classic, argues Clemency Burton-Hill.

By Clemency Burton-Hill 24 February 2015

It is 30 years since Amadeus swept the board at the Academy Awards. Miloš Forman’s 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, took home eight statuettes that night, including best film, best director, best actor and best adapted screenplay. Arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity, it has taken its place in motion picture history and is invariably described as a masterpiece. All this is despite the fact the film plays shamelessly fast and loose with historical fact, taking as its basis a supposedly bitter rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his counterpart Antonio Salieri, court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, that may have been nothing more than a vague rumor. With Pushkin as his inspiration, Peter Shaffer took this grisly anecdote as a starting point for what Simon Callow – the actor who first played Mozart on stage – describes as “a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent”. Shaffer, says Callow, gives us a Salieri “who was industrious, skillful and pious, driven to homicide by a Mozart who was foul-mouthed, feckless, infantile and effortlessly inspired. In Shaffer's play, Salieri was the one person in 18th-Century Vienna who fully grasped the extent of Mozart's genius, and was thus the one most savagely wounded by it. To him, it was a cruel joke perpetrated by the God he worshipped - that the vessel chosen to receive the greatest music ever written was the least worthy of His creatures; all Salieri's piety and good taste had been passed over in favor of a repulsive little nerd.” Shaffer has always been relaxed about wanting to write a cracking drama, irrespective of historical precision, describing his work as a “fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri”. Ingeniously, he gets around the problem by having Salieri, by this stage an old, terminally ill and classic unreliable narrator, show and tell us everything – right from the opening moment, when he whispers dramatically one night in 1823: “Forgive me, Mozart, I killed you.” (Mozart had died a mysterious pauper’s death in 1791). Few historical sources exist about Salieri’s life, so with this formal structure in place Shaffer could take as much dramatic license as he liked. Like any good dramatist, Shaffer identified the things that suited his story – mining Mozart’s letters for scatological baby talk to his cousin, for example – and left out the things that weren’t – for example the fact that the Mozart and Salieri families were friendly enough that Salieri was later employed as Mozart’s son’s teacher. “I came up with the idea for this play after reading a lot about Mozart,” Shaffer recalls. “I was struck by the contrast between the sublimity of his music and the vulgar buffoonery of his letters. I am often criticized for portraying him as an imbecile, but I was actually conveying his childlike side: his letters read like something written by an eight-year-old. At breakfast he’d be writing this puerile, foul-mouthed stuff to his cousin; by evening, he’d be completing a masterpiece….” In any case, the reverence with which the film treats Mozart’s work is undeniable: we, like Salieri, are hit with one perfect melody after another. Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields give outstanding performances on the soundtrack. F Murray Abraham as Salieri talks us through the opening of the piece, introducing each instrument, ending with the words: “This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” It did, indeed.