Salieri leans in to his tale with a series of comparisons between his plain and philistine upbringing in the middle class and Mozart growing up performing marvels of music for the crowned heads. Then comes the day that, as adults, the two meet in Vienna in a moment of shock for the Italian as Mozart unknowingly reveals himself to be a dirty minded boy with a whinnying laugh that would make a filly blush. A few salient encounters later, before the Emperor and other luminaries, the vulgar upstart embarrasses or insults or utterly miffs Kapellmeister Salieri such that he regards himself to be Mozart's earthly nemesis. The same god who made the monkey a musical genius was the one who gave the virtuous artisan just enough talent to see it. It's on.
When this film was fresh there were many who whinged about the low historical accuracy. They missed a few points. First, the title is not just Mozart's middle name; it's meaning, beloved of god, is how he is seen by the narrator of his life. That narrator, plinking away at an old forte piano in the dust and straw of a pre-compassion mental institution, is consumed with a persistent resentment mixed with a leaden guilt. This is not what you'd call an impartial witness. The Mozart we meet is like one of the sweet toothed Salieri's exotic mazipan lollies; dressed in bright finery, tinkling with giggles and brashly childish, an ungrateful benefactor of divine gifts. The Mozart in Amadeus is created by the lifelong anger of a man who considered himself cheated for eternity. It's not a biopic, it's a fable.
This is why it doesn't play like a cinema biography with a series of great moments in history shoehorned into its timeline. The play by the mythology-fancying Peter Schaffer keeps its focus unwaveringly on legend and what it might mean to us across history. Milos Forman's genius was to dress it up like a pageant but have it play like a campfire tale. There's pomp, ceremony and a dizzying pallet of colours, materials and styles from the 18th century, looking just enough like the indirect sunlight of the formal painting of the day (as well as a fair share of scurrility from the likes of Hogarth) but also pushed into a kind of post punk edge through some very sharp eyed art direction. Never, though, is that allowed to pop through the narrative; this really is not Ken Russell's Mozart.
This limited fluidity allows for some brash casting and performance. Tom Hulce gives us a Mozart in constant nuclear creation, a stream of imagined music running through his head as he swigs champagne, skipping through the streets. Elizabeth Berridge as wife Constanze errs on the side of trashy to make a unit that everyone of us knew when we were in our twenties. One reviewer (whose name I wish I could remember) nailed it when she wrote: "Tom Hulce and Elizabeth Berridge as the Mozarts are so cute and American they're like a couple of cartoon mice." I really can't top that.
Jeffery Jones is so angular and taciturn in his turn as the Emperor that my sister described him perfectly as an axolotl. When confronted with a hint of impropriety or delighted with joyful news he tends to give no more than a tight "mm-hm!" The sense of restraint is intimidating and funny.
Of the performances here, though, it is the one where the Oscars showed that they really could get it right when they tired. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri is a wonder. From the striding younger man to the ancient sage on step from dust he seizes our attention and plays us for the whole running time. The glow in his eyes as he manipulates the priest for his own pleasure comes straight through the screen. In movement, voice and demeanour he is this film's every phase made manifest. Not a line of Schaffer's gloriously showy language rings false.
The themes of great vs mediocre, immortal vs earthly come to a head during the scene were an ailing Mozart is dictating the score of his Requiem to Salieri. There is just enough music theory in the dialogue to indicate that two professionals are at work, one feverishly calling out his thoughts and the other writing them down. It is the moment when Salieri witnesses first hand what has caused him such awe. He almost kills the flow of thought from the sick bed with his befuddlement until Mozart clarifies as though revealing how he has worked a magic trick. In those moments the depiction of genius and its astounded reception themselves astound. Mozart is writing his own death mass to Salieri who intends to present it as his own work and yet the desperate need to get it recorded transcends the earthly filth of envy or arrogance. This scene, once again, made me well up as it did when I first saw it in the cinema and every viewing thereafter. As film craft it is an impeccable result of deft narrative that has brought these two figures from the lofty distance of the court to commoners into such a compelling intimacy. It is a perfect scene.
It's this that Amadeus wants us to know, not Mozart's life and times. Prague stands in perfectly well for Age of Enlightenment Vienna, the splendour of the Classical era stage, the joyful suburban vaudeville, all the contrasts that present Mozart's world would work all by themselves but the enmity between the fleeting fire of genius and the gutters of the everyday is what keeps the story running. As for history, this is not even trying. It's myth. Playwright Schaffer even buys into the legend of the masked messenger who delivers the commission for the requiem which has its roots in Mozart's guilt at disappointing his father who died before it was resolved. (Tom Hulce's bloodless fear at their first meeting is magnetic.) If we might tsk at this or that historical impossibility we would do much better to remind ourselves (as the film is happy to) that we are hearing all of this from an old man enraged at his own mediocrity; not insane, consumed.
I saw this in early 1985 with my mum. She had wanted to go to A Passage to India which I thought looked dull (I know it's by David Lean but it still looks dull) so I talked her around. It was long but there was an intermission. We were both spellbound by it and went for coffee and cake afterwards. Soon after, I took my sister and her husband to it and I delighted in their awe. It remains one of my favourite cinema experiences. This is helped by my own fandom of Mozart.
Mozart was my childhood hero. I was a classical-only listener from the age of ten to thirteen and the gateway drug that led to my first record purchases (Mozart and Bach) was the serenade Eine Kleine Nachtmusik which we had at home. While at thirteen I soon learned to at least profess devotion to the crap I heard on Countdown if I wanted to survive high school. I actually took to rock music pretty readily and kept with it. However, I have time and again, wound it back and returned to Mozart and the gang, even venturing into the twentieth century composers (so, take that, Spotify!). Amadeus didn't get me back into Classical era music as I'd already started that with 4MBS while at uni and the crazy bargains at the Record Market in town. What Amadeus did for me was make me a deeper listener as I came to appreciate the lives and times that forged the sound, whether it was joyous celebration or pleading to an indifferent deity.
F. Murray Abraham won the Oscar for his performance and thanked Tom Hulce from the podium. The costuming category featured a group of models in eighteenth century finery who strode in stately pomp before the music turned to some cod Chuck Berry and they all broke into the Jive. That joke felt more exhausting than hearing any bedroom guitarist play Anarchy in the U.K. as a ballad or a classical piece as metal. Abraham's win almost erased it from memory.
In 2002 Milos Forman expanded his own creation. I had bought a lovely double digipak with the feature on one disc and bonus material on another. The extras included a string of quite wonderful scenes removed from the cinema release. I watched them once. When I had a cull of my DVDs about ten years later, I gave this away, having replaced it with the Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray featured the director's cut which included Forman's protests that this was the way he'd really wanted it. My long but magnetic favourite movie epic had become like almost all of these revisions, a bloated mess that dragged like a school play. There is a moment in one of Salieri's monologues where he recalls with exquisite ache how the sight of Mozart's first draughts were perfect: remove a phrase and there would be diminishment, add one and it would be overdone. If only Forman had heeded this lesson.
These extra scenes (a whopping twenty minutes of them) variously render Salieri far more of a monster than he needed to be, Mozart ruder and more pathetic than he needed to be and robbed Abraham's performance of a astutely judged wicked grin. The changes were too drastic for seamless branching to be effective so that's how the film was presented without a choice for the viewer to watch the original.
This happened with a number of other modern classics like Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist (whose version you've never seen became the only one anyone could see for years) and like those the Amadeus extended cut rewrites history with an implied lie that this interminable soapy drudge was the same film that won eight Oscars. Forman, no longer with us, cannot offer comment nor a wish to release the original and best. There have been mutters afoot that a fortieth anniversary edition on 4K will appear and it will feature the cinema cut as the primary one. While I'd love that, it's already June 2024 and no one who might release it (WB or Criterion) had done so much as mention it.
For this blog I repurchased an original DVD release, which is the sole means of seeing it in its true form. The seller knew what he had and priced it accordingly (not outrageous but for more than an old DVD normally goes for). I paid up and received a relic of the early era of digital video: a flipper disc (content on both sides) in a snapper case (mostly paper with a plastic clasp). Once again, for the first time in decades, I watched one of my favourite films the way it was meant to be seen. Old compressed and noisy transfer aside, it was a marvel. I choose this as my favourite from the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Firemen's Ball, an artist whose adaptability gave him a highly distinguished career in the empathy engine medium of cinema where his touch at its best was light and whose trust in the stories he was realising was profound. All of his best qualities as a maker of cinema converged at this point to produce something very possibly eternal. So, release the original bloody cut in 4K, you bastards!
Viewing notes: as aforesaid, I was compelled to buy an old copy on DVD to watch this in its original and superior edit. The transfer is plagued with noise and compression artefacts but the movie still plays gloriously. There are people in there twenties who might love this film but have probably never seen it properly. Argh! Currently, there is no means of seeing this cut legitimately outside of a retro cinema screening or an old DVD.
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