Document View

Tibbets comments on the film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, which was originally done as a play at London's National Theatre in 1979. As compared to the play, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's role in the film has been greatly expanded from a supporting role to one co-equal with Antonio Salieri; and they emerge more fully fleshed out and more sympathetic characters. He opines that if art does not exactly imitate life, in this case, the movie, which was directed by Milos Forman, effectively conveyed and confirmed the myth of Mozart as the passive servant of the Music of the Spheres--or, at least, as the auditor of the music of prerecorded Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

"Mozart! Forgive your assassin!" screams Antonio Salicri, esteemed composer to the court of Joseph II of Austria. "I confess; I killed you!"

Milos Forman's Amadeus opens with a scream of anguish, accompanied by the two big opening chords of the Overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni. When friends burst in Salieri's door, they find him on the floor, blood issuing from his torn throat.

Another blast of music-the stormy opening of Mozart's Symphony No. 25.

Later, in an asylum, the sick and ageing Salieri, bandages around his neck, is preter-naturally calm as he recounts to a visiting priest his relationship with Mozart. He had known Mozart since he was a child prodigy. Later, as Kapellmeister to the Hapsburg court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Salieri had witnessed the young man's amazing feats of improvisation (at the expense of a little march Salieri had composed). But it is not until Mozart's wife, Constanze, brings him a stack of original manuscripts and pleads for his help that Salieri truly realizes what a gifted-and potentially dangerous-rival he has at Joseph's court. "You scorn my attempts at virtue," says Salieri, addressing the God who created this miscreant, "because You are unjust, unfair, unkind-I will block You! I swear it! I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able! I will ruin Your Incarnation!" Thereafter, Salieri conspires behind Mozart's back to thwart his efforts to win court favor. He installs a spy, a maid, in Mozart's apartment. He contrives to haunt him with the apparition of a masked, cloaked figure commissioning a Requiem (which Salieri secretly intends to claim as his own composition). He attempts to thwart a production of The Marriage of Figaro. In spite of himself, however, after witnessing a performance of The Magic Flute (composed at the behest of the impresario Emanuel Schikaneder), he finds his hatred yielding to a more admiring and sympathetic regard. Thus, when Mozart breaks down in the middle of the opera's performance, a by-now compassionate Salieri sees him back to his lodgings. Realizing Mozart is too weak to compose by himself, he offers to take down his "dictation" of the Requiem. But it is too late. The dying man summons up only a few measures of music before he sinks back against the pillow, exhausted, unable to complete the "Lacrimosa." The next morning, Constanze returns to the apartment and is alarmed at Mozart's emaciated condition. She angrily demands that Salieri leave. At that moment, Mozart breathes his last. In the epilogue, Mozart's body is carted out to a pauper's grave, thrust into the excavation in a sack, and covered with quicklime. Back in the present, Salieri announces to the startled priest that God has cruelly deprived him of a role in dispatching Mozart. Hereafter, he, Salieri, absolves the world and everyone in it of mediocrities. He wheels his chair through the asylum, gesturing his absolutions to the writhing, anguished, and confused inmates. Mozart's cackling laughter is heard as the scene fades to black.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

Amadeus began as a play by Peter Shaffer at London's National Theatre in 1979, was transplanted (with revisions) to Broadway a year later, was published in book form in 1981, and appeared on the screen (with still more revisions) in a film adapted by Shaffer, and produced and directed by the team of Saul Zaentz and Milos Forman in 1984 (the same team that made One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest in 1975).1 The film, shot over a six-month period on location in Prague, budgeted at $18 million, and running almost two-and-a-half hours, subsequently won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (for F. Murray Abraham's portrayal of Salieri). Despite a firestorm of controversy about the liberties taken with the historical facts by both play and film-including complaints about the undue exaggerations of Mozart's penury and lack of recognition, the unflattering portrait of Salieri, the implication that Salieri intended to murder Mozart, the suggestion that Salieri himself appeared in disguise to harass Mozart to compose the Requiem, the lack of references to Mozart's other children, the portrait of Mozart as a musical rebel, the wholly fabricated deathbed scene, the use of modern instruments in the simulation of eighteenth-century orchestral performance, etc.2-Amadeus stimulated a fresh public and professional interest in the composer. "Almost at once," claims musicologist Robert L. Marshall, "Mozart became the most popular, most well-known, most purchased and, I do believe, the most truly enjoyed of the classical composers, readily displacing Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and anyone else who, before 1980, might have disputed his claim to that position." Marshall goes so far as to claim that enrollment in college music courses nationwide "saw an unprecedented increase" (177).

The reasons are many. First of all, and perhaps superficially, the film appealed to conspiracy theorists who have continued, since Mozart's death, to speculate about his murder at the hands of a variety of suspects, ranging from Salieri himself to a cabal of Masons offended at Mozart's alleged transgressions against their Order.3 More importantly, Shaffer and his co-screenwriting partner, Forman, had wrought an ingenious fable about the capriciousness of talent to which anyone could relate. Who can tell why a conscientious, hardworking fellow has to languish in the shadow of the lazy genius at the next desk-who flings his talents about with little reason or discrimination? It is a mystery that appeals to a secular age like ours, not a little dismayed at the toppling of gods and heroes. And embodying this cruel disparity were two superbly and theatrically opposed characters, who just happen to be named Mozart and Salieri. And there is the music itself. Like so many composer biopics before it, Amadeus wears on its sleeve a frank agenda to exploit the "prestige" factor of classical music. Whereas music had been at most a minimal element in the stage version, as will be noted presently, on film, courtesy of Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and vocal and instrumental performers Samuel Ramey, Felicity Lott, June Anderson, Richard Stilwell, Ivan Moravec, and Imogen Cooper, it leaps to the foreground in all its polished glory. Like the classical Hollywood biopics of yore, it wrenches the music from its original contexts and weaves them into a soundtrack that is a seamless web of themes and textures enhancing and counterpointing the action. At the same time, however, following a growing trend in biopics since the 1960s, it also emphasizes music as performance, notably, staging excerpts from Schikaneder's riotous satire on Mozartean operas, Mozart's open-air performance of a piano concerto, and excerpts from Don Giovanni.

Three of the film's biggest scenes foreground diegetic and nondiegetic music in ways that throw Salieri and Mozart's complementary characters into sharp relief-Mozart's improvisation on Salieri's "Welcome March," Salieri's stunned encounter with Mozart's manuscripts, which Constanze has brought him, and Mozart's deathbed "dictation" to Salieri of the Requiem's "Confutatis Maledictus." The first displays a diegetic display of music as performance, when an irrepressible Mozart effortlessly tosses off brilliant variations on Salieri's stodgy little tune, to the amusement of Joseph II and his audience, and to Salieri's growing discomfiture. The second scene constructs an interior diegesis, when, after Salieri examines the miraculously error-free manuscripts, he "hears" in his head their heaven-sent sounds and erupts in a vengeful rage against the cruel providence that bestows such gifts upon a seemingly naughty yet innocent child. The third scene, not present in the original play, may well claim to be the most arresting and vividly remembered moment in the whole picture-as the scribbling Salieri desperately tries to catch up to the dying composer's "dictation" of the "Confutatis Maledictus." Layer by layer, the voices and instrumentation sounding in Mozart's head are communicated by some strange sort of psychic transfer to Salieri. Mozart first sets the male chorus' declamation, then the trombone instrumentation, the underlying tympani, the female voicings, the agitated ostinato passages in strings, and finally the plangent "Voca Mei" for high voices. The scene ends as Mozart, pale and drawn, falls back on the pillow, exhausted. "Let's stop now," he says, "we'll finish the Lacrimosa later."4 Not since Frederick Delius's musical dictations to amanuensis Eric Fenby were depicted in Ken Russell's Song of Summer has such an exciting, almost visceral moment of creation been captured on film. In the present writer's opinion, no Hollywood chase scene can rival its breathless urgency.5 The three scenes bind the film together in a graceful arcfrom Salieri's initial amazement, to his growing anger (he thrusts a crucifix into a fireplace at the moment of his decision to murder Mozart), and, finally, to his humbling recognition of the music's transcendence over his petty jealousy and envy. At the same time, Mozart is transformed from a prankster, to an unseen musical mystery, to a divinely inspired voice of God.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

The film's portrait of Mozart is a compelling blend of the familiar and unfamiliar. On the one hand, the Shaffer-Forman Mozart bears the likeness of the mythologized Mozart that had persisted since his death at the age of 35 in 1791 and had been confirmed as recently as the translation in 1982 of a highly esteemed biography by Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Commentator Nicholas Spice flatly declares that Hildesheimer's portrait of a dysfunctional, childlike Mozart "as a sort of autist, unable to form satisfactory human relationships . . . and incapable of the ordinary range of human feelings" provided a "congenial source for the elaboration of Amadeus" (3). This was the myth of Mozart as the "eternal child, the stereotype of the musical genius that is "possessed" by powers beyond his ken and who creates with seemingly no effort at all. Rooted in Plato and later espoused in Schopenhauer, this "possession" theory holds that the muse, or God, speaks through the poet, who, although naïve and rather childlike, is gifted with prodigious "natural" talents. It was Mozart's associates and first biographers who first presented him in this light.6 On the other hand-and what startled the first audiences of the play and film so much-is Shaffer's close-up view of a flawed Mozart, a selfish, self-indulgent character with a high-pitched giggle, a penchant for scatological language, and a style of bohemian behavior quite in keeping with the rockstar sensibility of the 1980s. "I am a vulgar man," he says, "but my music is not."

Significantly, neither of these character traits is that far removed from reality. Biographer Maynard Solomon locates the eternal child myth in Mozart's relationship with his father, Leopold, who, for his own ends, determined that his precocious son would never grow up. "In actuality," Solomon writes, "Mozart wanted to leave childhood and its subjections behind, to shatter the frozen perfection of the little porcelain violinist and to put in his place a living man, one with sexual appetites, bodily functions, irreverent thoughts, and selfish impulses, one who needed to live for himself and his loved ones . . ." (12). There is ample evidence that Mozart did indeed write with great speed and facility. "From these and numerous similar stories we can surmise that Mozart must have had a photographic memory and could compose music faster than his pen would write," claims musicologist Erich Hertzman. "He must have worked out many compositions in his head before he sat down to put them on paper" (190). Musicologist Marshall recalls his "amazement bordering on disbelief" of the autograph of the E-flat Piano Concert, K. 482-"with respect to the compositional process, it contained nothing of interest. Indeed, there were almost no corrections of any kind, not even minor ones." As for the giggle and the language, Marshall further confirms that in Mozart's time, particularly in Germany, the use of frank, scatological language was nothing strange or unusual. Moreover, while we know nothing of the sound of Mozart's laughter, it takes only a moment to measure its appropriateness as "the mocking laughter of the gods: laughter directed toward all us common mortals who have been spitefully, maliciously denied the fire of creative genius" (176-78).

Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman's transformation ofAmadeus from the stage to the screen offers an object lesson in the adaptive process. "[The cinema's] unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone living largely by the spoken word," noted Shaffer dryly. Amadeus would have to be totally reimagined as a film (quoted in Deemer 75). The original play, as staged in London and later revised for the American production, is in two acts, divided into twelve and seven scenes, respectively. Through subtle lighting techniques and minimal prop changes, Salieri's salon serves also as Mozart's last apartment, the Viennese streets, and an opera stage. Salieri is on stage, in a wheelchair, the whole time, and he entreats the audience members-his "ghosts of the future"-to come to his room in "the smallest hours of dark November, 1823" and hear his tale. The ensuing action is presented in a highly stylized manner with distorting lighting effects, suggestive of the fractured memories of the ageing composer. An offstage chorus of whispering voices and two venticelli, "purveyors of fact, rumor and gossip," accompany and comment on events. Incidents not retained in the film include scenes with Salieri and his mistress and suggestions that Mozart betrayed the secret rituals of the Freemasons in The Magic Flute. Also not included was Mozart's death scene, in Scenes 15 and 16, Act Two. It begins with Mozart unmasking Salieri's cloaked figure, whereupon Salieri turns to the dying man. "God does not love you, Amadeus!" he says accusingly. "He cares nothing for whom He uses: nothing for whom He denies . . . You are no use to Him anymore." Mozart is reduced to infantile behavior. "Behold my vow fulfilled," crows Salieri, "the profoundest voice in the world reduced to a nursery tune." Salieri leaves. Constanze enters and Mozart tells her that Salieri has killed him. He dies. The scene then shifts back to Salieri in his wheelchair. He tells us that his "confession" of killing Mozart is false; that he only made it to achieve the immortality he craves: "For the rest of the time whenever men say Mozart with love, they will think of Salieri with loathing! . . . I am going to be immortal after all! And He is powerless to prevent it" (94). Whereupon he cuts his throat. Dying, he addresses the audience: "Mediocrities everywhere-now and to come-I absolve you all. Amen!" (Shaffer, Amadeus).

"As an actor on stage I never attempted to give a 'rounded' characterization," says Simon Callow, who originated the part of Mozart opposite Paul Scofield's Salieri in the first London stage production:

I played it as a series of shards, lumps of Mozart, a mind teeming with music, almost giddy with it, like a nuclear explosion going on in front of Mozart's brain. I was the "vulgar creature," the strutting punk, the Chanticleer. Here we were in the National Theatre-long before Jerry Springer the opera was a glint in Nick Hytner's eye-a grand national institution which had just been taken over by Peter Hall. The memory of Laurence Olivier was still very strong. And here's this Mozart, the most perfect composer, a sublime immortal, who comes on stage about twenty minutes after the action has begun; and when he does, his first utterance is to meow like a pussycat. Then he gets down on his hands and knees and runs around on stage with Felicity Kendall, who was at that time an absolute English rose in everyone's imagination. So I romp after Felicity. I hurl her to the ground, and I say, "I'd like to shit on your nose!" The audience was horrified. They couldn't believe it. Salieri stands there in a state of rigid shock. Then, a few moments later, he hears the sounds of the slow movement of the Wind Serenade. And it is sublime. The conjunction of those two scenes was a brilliant stroke.7

Music, like the action, is mediated through the distorting filters of Salieri's memory. "It's subtle 'treatment,'" says Shaffer, "suggested the sublime work of a genius being experienced by another musician's increasingly agonized mind" (Shaffer, "Screen Speak" xiv). Callow explains that Shaffer's first idea was not to use music by Mozart at all:

It should be a sort of faux Mozartean sound. It should sound like Mozart but all be filtered through the faulty memory of Salieri. We started to do that, but Harrison Birtwhistle, the music director, decided instead to do an aural distort of patches of Mozart music. Nothing was played "straight" at all, and it was used very carefully and sparingly. In that kind of melodramatically distorted atmosphere there was relatively little attempt to simulate keyboard performance. Paul [Scofield] quite rightly knew that his charisma was such that his audience would believe anything; and no matter how carefully I tried to simulate it, Paul rather gave the game away by just flailing away with his arms and hands. He didn't give a damn, and his audience didn't give a damn, either.

How different all this is in the film. "The screenplay was a very different entity from the play," recalls Callow, who was eventually given the part of Mozart's colorful friend and collaborator, Emanuel Schikaneder,8 "which was possessed of a wild, distorted energy, an E.T.A. Hoffmann-like exaggeration, lit by candles and filled with monstrous shadows." Salieri's attempted suicide begins, rather than ends, the story. He is in an asylum rather than his apartment. He speaks to a priest, rather than directly to the audience. Because he is not on screen all the time, we tend to accept the flashbacks as real instead of resulting from the distortions of his mind. Events are conveyed in a relatively conventional visual style, instead of the more theatrically stylized sets and lighting. The whispering voices and the venticelli are gone. The incidents involving the Masonic rituals are gone. Mozart's role has been greatly expanded from a supporting role to one co-equal with Salieri. In this more naturalistic environment, he and Salieri are less caricatured as, respectively, the sinister villain and the cruel child. They emerge more fully fleshed out and more sympathetic characters. "Tom Hulce played the part from a much more psychological point of view," says Callow, "more emotionally retarded, very tender and sweet, very sincere. He brought a natural sweetness of disposition, a tenderness and a delicacy to the role which I could never match. Tom's 'Wolfie' was an over-exuberant child, mine on the stage suffered from Tourette's syndrome." Similarly, Salieri's character, as played by F. Murray Abraham, was considerably softened. "In the play Salieri was incredibly vain," explains Hulce, "but here in the film he's more sympathetic, very good at his work. He loves Mozart's music but he also hates it because he can't touch it in his own work."9 (By no means coincidentally, this approach to both characters is reminiscent of Pushkin's short dramatic dialogue, Mozart and Salieri, conceived in 1826, just a year after Salieri's death, wherein Salieri, explains Borowitz, is depicted "as a dedicated musician who was intent on the perfection of his craft" but who is "enraged by Mozart's free, creative spirit and by what he sees as Mozart's light-hearted, almost negligent, relation to the products of his genius" [282-83].) The death scene was wholly rewritten, and it is a superbly contrived exercise in visual and sound montage. "It is deeply affecting and beautifully observed from a medical point of view," says Callow. "On stage, mine was deliberately grotesque, almost expressionist" (16). And at the end, Salieri does not speak directly to us, the audience, to absolve us of our "mediocrities"; rather, he directs his absolutions toward the lunatics in the asylum. And, as has been noted, the musical elements have been greatly amplified (literally), and they saturate the images.

Both Callow and Tom Hulce, who took over Callow's role for the film, have left vivid impressions of the transfer from stage to screen. Callow claims that everyone knew that Forman decided to film the play immediately after he saw the London preview in November 1979:

We also knew that for the film he would not want me, or Paul, or Felicity Kendall [Constanze]; he would want huge stars to play these parts. And over the months every major star even faintly eligible came to see the play-Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro. They were all there, every single A-list male star, watching us like hawks, sitting in the third row. It was hilarious. They were like legacy hunters, hovering around the bedside, waiting for us to be gone so they could make the movie. Then, Milos announced suddenly that he wanted "unknowns." Before, we hadn't been famous enough; now we were too famous!

Shaffer reports that from the outset there would have to be what he called a "demolition" of the play's more insistently theatrical elements. "[Forman] pointed out that the film of a play is really a new work," Shaffer explained at the time of the film's release, "another fulfillment of the same impulse which had created the original. The adapter's task was to explore many new paths in order to emerge in the end at the same emotional place. . . . In the case of Amadeus, its operatic stylization would probably have to be made less formal, though not, of course, more juvenile" (Shaffer, "Screen Speak" 57). Forman made it clear that his actors would have to conform to the naturalistic demands of the film medium. "Stage actors are wonderful, big, generous," he told Callow. "But they can't use film, always acting, always doing something. On film you must BE. And you must be yourself, I cast you to be you. Otherwise I cast someone else." Likewise, he told Hulce that he "wanted the approach to be contemporary and bring out as much naturalism and sweat and humor as possible to the characters. Not to put them on pedestals at all, but to make them real and breathing." Callow confirms in his autobiography, Shooting the Actor, that for Forman, "Mo/art was less a creature of Salieri's deceiving imagination, more a real man. . ." (16).

Shooting the film amid so many authentic locations in Prague could only enhance the "realistic" nature of the proceedings. This was a Prague in the early 1980s, recalls Callow, still "in the Communist decadence of 1982, its hidden city flowing darkly like an underground stream underneath the sometimes glittering, sometimes crumbling metropolis above." At that time Prague offered the most complete Baroque and Rococo settings in Europe. "It is possible to turn a camera there in a complete circle," says Shaffer, "and see in its frame nothing built after Mozart's death." Even the people of the city were ideally suited to function as period extras:

[They] are not embarrassed by wearing period costume: the smallest bit-player on a day's leave from the factory looks absolutely natural in perruque and pelisse. . . . Contemplating the audiences of extras assembled in the Tyl theatre to watch the Mozart operas being played-the very theatre where Don Giovanni was first produced!-one experiences the miraculous feeling of time being reclaimed from oblivion. (Shaffer, "Screen Speak" 56)

As Callow and Shaffer walked about the Old Town at night, they realized that this was the self-same city that Mozart knew well. "You can still see the adjacent hotels where he and his librettist for Don Giovanni, Lorenzo da Ponte, stayed. . . . Giovanni 's premiere took place in the very theatre where we were filming the opera sequences. . . ." At other times, while walking the streets at night, "we would half expect a carriage to draw up and Mozart himself to leap out of it" (16).

And while, as has been noted, the details of music performance on stage had been rather carelessly rendered by Callow and Scofield, on film it was a different matter. Hulce, who had no previous musical training, had to learn to simulate keyboard performance:

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

It was an act of God and my will power that within a few weeks I could play basically all the pieces you see me play in the film. A real challenge were the brief scenes where you see me writing music with one hand while caroming billiard balls off the cushions of the table with the other. We did endless takes of that scene. I was determined to he accurately writing the music you hear on the track. But in take after take, something would go wrong-the ink would spill, the ball would bounce off the table or scatter the pages. It took hours and hours just to get those few seconds. All of the recording itself was done in a two-week period prior to the start of filming. Neville [Marriner] oversaw all of that. As for conducting, I was just encouraged to "keep it simple." Conducting at that time was more a matter of time-keeping than anything else.

Enlarge 200% Enlarge 400%

Despite its wealth of surface detail and its abundance of music that was transferred to the screen relatively intact, at no time did either Forman or Shaffer claim Amadeus to be a history lesson about Mozart. "We were not making an objective Life of Wolfgang Mozart," insisted Shaffer in 1984:

This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film is even less of one. . . . We are blatantly claiming the grand license of the storyteller to embellish his tale with fictional ornament and, above all, to supply it with a climax whose sole justification need be that it enthralls his audience and emblazons his theme. (Shaffer, "Screen Speak" 56)

At any rate, the famous deathbed scene, the nightlong encounter between the dying Mozart and the "spiritually ravenous" Salieri is justified more for its dramatic plausibility than its historical inaccuracy. "Such a scene never took place in fact," explains Shaffer. "However, our concern at this point was not with facts but with the undeniable laws of drama. It is where-holding fast to the thread of our protagonist's mania-we were finally led" (Shaffer, "Screen Speak" 56).

Perhaps unwittingly, the very staging of this deathbed scene confirms the myth that Mozart composed effortlessly, unconsciously, obeying the dictates of a music that already presented itself fully formed in his head. It will be recalled that as Mozart gasps out the notes, key signatures, voices, and instrumentation to Salieri, the appropriate music magically appears, as if on cue, layer by layer, on the soundtrack. Mozart's internal diegesis becomes Salieri's as well, a musical bond between them that had been hitherto denied and that now transforms Mozart from a giggling child to a spiritual presence and Salieri from a vengeful madman into a redeemed soul. "Shaffer was once a music critic," says Hulce:

and for him to write a scene of one composer dictating music to another-and to do it with all the correct technical musicological terminology-was quite a daring thing to do to an audience. I made a bargain with F. Murray Abraham before shooting it that I would know the scene so well that any time he got behind or lost in taking the dictation, he could stop me in character and ask me what to do. Milos set it up to shoot with two cameras at once, so that any accidents that happened could be matched. It was an intensely exciting process. I never knew where "Salicri" was going to get lost, so there were accidents that happened-it was shot in one continuous take and edited later-that were captured spontaneously on film. At the same time, I had to hum the snatches of music in the same key and in the same tempo as the prerecorded music. I wore a small transistor speaker in my ear, concealed beneath the hairpiece, which relayed the music to me. It was like I was taking a musical dictation, just like Mozart might have been "hearing" the music in his head! Three parts of my brain had to be working all at once-speaking my lines, humming and singing the notes, and listening to the music in my earpiece.

If art does not exactly imitate life, in this case, the movie effectively conveyed and confirmed the myth of Mozart as the passive servant of the Music of the Spheres-

-or, at least, as the auditor of the music of the prerecorded Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Interviews

Simon Callow. 21 July 2003. London.

Tom Hulce. 6 Oct. 1984. Kansas City, Missouri.