“I was struck by the contrast between the sublimity of his music and the vulgar buffoonery of his letters. “I came up with the idea for this play after reading a lot about Mozart,” Shaffer recalls. Like any good dramatist, he 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 Franz Xaver’s teacher. Few historical sources exist about Salieri’s life, so with this formal structure in place Shaffer could take as much dramatic licence as he liked. “Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer,” he admits, “and the film was even less of one.” 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). 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”. So immediate was the impact of the play that he apparently turned to Shaffer’s agent during the first intermission and announced that he had to make a film of it. Miloš Forman was in the audience for the first preview of the production that starred Callow (and Paul Scofield as Salieri) at London’s National Theatre in 1979. 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 favour of a repulsive little nerd.”
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. Shaffer, says Callow, gives us a Salieri “who was industrious, skilful and pious, driven to homicide by a Mozart who was foul-mouthed, feckless, infantile and effortlessly inspired. 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”. The play was later set as an opera by the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and has continued to grip the artistic imagination ever since. It was Alexander Pushkin who first seized on the idea that the alleged rivalry between these two Vienna-based composers might make good drama: in 1830 he published a short play called Mozart and Salieri, in which the latter murders the former onstage. She describes it as “laughably” wrong – “a deadly rivalry that never was, a dried-up bachelor who was actually a father of eight, and flops that were hits in reality” – and reckons nothing about the film can redeem “the fact that the entire premise – that Salieri loathed Mozart and plotted his demise – is probably not true”.
Alex von Tunzelmann, writing in the Guardian, is one of the many historians frustrated by the glittering success of a film that is so inaccurate, historically speaking.
Amadeus movie#
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.Īll 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 rumour. 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. It is 30 years since Amadeus swept the board at the Academy Awards.
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