The following notes for Amadeus were written by Lance St. Laurent, PhD candidate in Film in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Amadeus, courtesy of the Academy Film Archive, will screen at the Cinematheque on Friday, April 18 at 7 p.m. The new DCP restores the original theatrical release version, the preferred cut of director Milos Forman. The Cinematheque’s regular venue is located at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free! The screening is co-presented by Madison Opera and their production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, May 2 & 4.
By Lance St. Laurent
“Wolfgang… Amadeus… Mozart.” As the name slithers out of the mouth of an aged Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), he casts his eyes upward when he reaches the middle name, for that name succinctly articulates the root of his hatred—for Mozart (Tom Hulce), the man who he has driven to an early grave; for God, the capricious deity who placed Mozart in his path; and for himself, the self-described patron saint of mediocrities. In Latin, the name Amadeus translates to “God’s love”, and for Salieri, that love, the spark of the divine and the transcendent that flows effortlessly through Mozart’s music, represents the ultimate indignity, a personal rebuke from God himself in favor of a buffoonish, vulgar man-child.
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that Amadeus—in both the original 1979 play by Peter Shaffer or its subsequent film adaptation from Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman—has little connection to historical reality. Although Salieri and Mozart were contemporaries working in the court of Austrian emperor Joseph II, most everything else about the story is a work of historical fiction, making the film’s status as a stalwart of school movie days all the stranger. The dramatic licenses taken by Amadeus may perturb the historians, but they allowed Shaffer and Forman to craft a tale of pettiness taken to its most exquisite heights.
Most of that pettiness is courtesy of Salieri, one of cinema’s true haters. Salieri oozes contempt, thinking himself the moral, intellectual, and artistic superior of those who surround him. But he’s also a shrewd political creature, working his way to a position as court composer for Emperor Joseph (Jeffrey Jones), a man whose patronage for the arts is only matched by his utter lack of taste or talent. Enter Mozart, a man whose reputation as a child prodigy precedes him. In Mozart, Salieri hopes to find a kindred spirit, someone whose talent is matched by a similarly serious-minded and sober approach to the musical arts. Instead, from a voyeur’s vantage point, he watches a cackling buffoon roll around and play dirty word games with a busty young woman. Only when the man hears his music playing does he sprint out of the room, revealing to Salieri’s horror that this childish cad is the same genius he so admires. So begins the first bubbling of resentment, first for Mozart, then for God himself, that will lead Salieri—pious, upstanding Salieri—down a path of all-consuming loathing that ends with Mozart’s untimely death.
At the time of Amadeus’s release, filmmaker Miloš Forman had already made the leap from luminary of Czechoslovakia’s New Wave—directing international festival darlings like Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967)—to Oscar darling. His own satirical and countercultural predilections turned out to be an inspired match to direct an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s seminal One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the subsequent film became only the second ever to sweep the Academy’s top 5 awards (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Actress). Though his two follow-ups—adaptations of the hippie musical Hair (1979) and the historical novel Ragtime (1981)—both received largely positive reviews, they fell far short of Cuckoo’s Nest’s critical and commercial performance. Amadeus, however, saw Forman once again reach the height of Hollywood acclaim.
On paper, Peter Shaffer’s play was an odd match for Forman’s sensibilities. Warring composers in eighteenth-century Vienna was seemingly a swerve from his usual sociopolitical occupations, and—as Ragtime demonstrated—lavish period productions were sometimes at odds with his grounded, observational style. An early sequence may depict a madhouse teeming with unwashed unfortunates, but Cuckoo’s Nest this was not. However, in Forman’s hands, the (largely one-sided) rivalry between Mozart and Salieri has shades of the conflict between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, albeit viewed from our antagonist’s perspective and given melodramatic flair by his self-satisfied speechifying. Mozart—always bucking convention, butting heads with his superiors, and bursting with inappropriate, ear-splitting laughter—is cast as something of a countercultural figure, a genius whose immaturity and lack of social graces limit his career opportunities and guarantee that he will not be fully appreciated in his own time. That is, by all but Salieri, a creature of the establishment with just enough talent to know how much his talent pales in comparison to Mozart’s. Mozart may die young, but it is Salieri who is truly cursed, forced to watch his own works fade into obscurity as Mozart becomes synonymous with artistic genius and his music becomes enshrined eternally in the popular consciousness.
This relationship would fall completely flat without the two actors giving it life. Though both Kenneth Branagh and Mark Hamill were considered for the role of Mozart, Forman swerved and cast Tom Hulce, a relatively obscure actor who had not been in a film in nearly 4 years. Hulce’s only well-known role prior to Amadeus was as meek pledge “Pinto” in Animal House, and his performance as Mozart bears out that background, giving the film some of its most uproarious, bawdy comedy. His Mozart cackles, curses, farts, and womanizes his way through Vienna with abandon, his only real concerns being his music and where he might procure his next paycheck. As Salieri, F. Murray Abraham positions the stuffy Italian composer as an ideal straight man to Mozart’s antics, his barely concealed disgust only matched by bewildered awe with his music. Whether secretly watching Mozart’s operas in the shadows or thumbing through his immaculate first drafts, Abraham excels at playing both the aesthetic bliss and ego-crushing pain of Mozart’s music for Salieri. Moreover, Abraham is tasked with narrating the film under heavy old-age makeup devised by The Exorcist’s Dick Smith, a narrative device that could grate in lesser hands. For Abraham, though, there is a discrete joy in hearing the difference between the stifled, secretive, holier-than-thou Salieri of the past and the reflective, unvarnished, cynical old man of the present.
Amadeus was a sensation upon release, winning 8 Oscars and even inspiring Austrian new wave singer Falco’s novelty hit “Rock Me, Amadeus.” Curiously, though, the film’s original theatrical cut—considered Forman’s preferred cut despite the longer, inferior version’s dubious designation as the “Director’s Cut”—was out of circulation for decades. With the new, extensive restoration, that absence has been rectified, allowing a new generation a chance to fully appreciate the splendor of one of Hollywood’s liveliest period dramas.