God's Beloved:
In Which the Author Ponders Life, the Universe, and Amadeus
It would not be exaggerating to say that Amadeus changed my life. When I first saw it, in September of 1984, I was a senior in high school, preparing to become a music major, and not particularly conversant with the wide Mozart catalog. We didn't play Mozart in youth symphony -- the orchestration was all wrong and would have left out too many people -- and that's really the only place I would have been exposed to much of his music in any substantial kind of way (not counting, say, some tunes in my mother's piano books). Then I saw the movie, and, more importantly, heard the music. And everything was different, forever.
The movie very cannily presents some of Mozart's most powerful pieces to their best advantage, and is a wonderful place to get an introduction to works like the Great C Minor mass, the Requiem, and The Marriage of Figaro. With the exceptions of perhaps the Gran Partita wind serenade and the piano concerto No. 20, it's the vocal music in particular that is presented with such loving respect and care, and the result is astonishing. I had never heard anything like that until I saw Amadeus, and from that point on, I was hooked.
I would go back to the theatre seven more times before I graduated that year, and another four the following fall as a freshman in college. By that time, I had not only begun amassing a record collection, I had been reading and studying about Mozart in the library, and had learned much about him and, subsequently, the movie.
It would take too much space to go into everything about the movie that's inaccurate; for a thorough, excellent, and well-written deconstruction that will illumine much about both Mozart and Salieri, read A. Peter Brown's essay written in 1991, the bicentennial of Mozart's death. If the movie purported to be a biography, it would be a travesty bordering on character assassination. The filmmakers, however, were adamant that this was no biography; instead, what they are doing is grappling with the grand themes of man-against-God and using Mozart's genius as the focal point, with Salieri as the stand-in for all non-genius, ordinary folk like ourselves. It's really a story about love and rejection: Salieri loves God, but God loves Mozart ("Amadeus," supposedly , meaning "God's beloved").
Peter Shaffer, playwright and screenwriter, was not the first to do this, either. Alexander Pushkin beat him to the punch by about 150 years with his work Mozart and Salieri, a short play that was turned into an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1897. As in Shaffer's play, Pushkin shows Salieri recognizing the divinity in Mozart's work; Pushkin, however, is even bolder than Shaffer -- in his play, Salieri actually poisons Mozart. For Peter Shaffer, it's all about metaphor: Salieri cannily steers Mozart to his own path of doom, poisoning the younger man's life not with lead or mercury, but by forcing him into inescapable corners -- and, of course, poisoning himself with hatred, envy, and unhappiness because God did not choose him to create That Music.
Because this is all supposedly focused through the imaginary lens of Salieri's jealousy, Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart is, while not true to the real man, dead on for the dramatic purpose of this morality fable. Thus it is acceptable for Amadeus' Mozart to be a funhouse mirror character; it is Salieri's jealousy that distorts his nature, and we only see Mozart through that filter. F. Murray Abraham's brilliant portrayal of a man consumed by disappointment is one of the greatest in modern movies, but it doesn't have much at all to do with the industrious, well-respected, more-than-competent (though certainly not great) man who served the Viennese court for fifty years and whose many pupils included Mozart's younger son Franz Xaver, Franz Schubert, and a young man from Bonn named Ludwig van Beethoven -- all of whom had nothing but the highest respect for him. If anyone had a case for character assassination, it would be Salieri, about whom the worst proven thing that can be said is that he did indeed have a weakness for sweets.
But enough about that. We've already acknowledged that the movie isn't life. It's an allegory that uses life as its props and historical figures as puppets; and shouldn't be judged as anything but. How we should judge it is as an independent work of art -- only now, we have two works to compare side by side: the original theatrical release, and the director's cut, released last year. As I have said, watching the original theatrical release was a life-altering event for me, and as a result I have a deep affection for it; also, I know it like some people know The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So it has taken me a couple of viewings of the director's cut to begin to formulate an opinion on it as compared to what we all know as the original.
There are a full twenty minutes of unseen footage (whether one calls it "added" or "restored" depends on your point of view as to which is the stronger film) ranging from a few more lines or a few more seconds included in otherwise familiar scenes, to entirely new vignettes that both further illuminate or extend previously-seen storylines. Some of these work better than others. For the most part, I don't care for the "new" extended scenes with Mozart and Michael Schlumberg (either the fiasco with the dogs during the music lesson, or its followup, years later), nor do I particularly enjoy the interlude in Katerina Cavalieri's dressing room after the Seraglio premiere. None of these scenes really add anything, or give us new perspectives on the characters.
One sequence, however, diverges profoundly from the theatrical release, giving Salieri's character an entirely new trajectory: Rather than turning his back and walking out on Constanze after viewing Mozart's portfolio that she has brought him in an attempt to get Wolfgang hired to an important post, he tells her in no uncertain terms that she must come back, that night, and have sex with him, for her husband to get the position. While waiting for her to return, he attempts to make a bargain with God: "Dear God, enter me now. Fill me with one piece of true music [...] so I know that you love me. Please. Just one. Show me one sign of your favor, and [...] I will get him the royal position, and if she comes, I’ll receive her with all respect and send her home in joy. Enter me! Enter me! Please!" God, of course, does not, and, when Constanze returns, Salieri allows her to partially disrobe before ringing for his servant and then departing, turning his back on her in an entirely different manner from what audiences saw in 1984.
If you've read the play, you know that this was in the original stage production; the addition to the filmed version of the astounding Qui Tollis from the C Minor mass makes it even more powerful and unsettling, now that is has been restored to the story. But it, again, utterly changes the character of Salieri, and the turning point of his relationship with his God. In the 1984 film, it is enough of a betrayal to see that God has already given Mozart His favor, and in a way Salieri can never hope to match. Every page after page of "miraculous" music is like a series of daggers plunged into Salieri's heart -- and soul. There is no need to make one last bargain, or to humiliate Constanze Mozart; God has forsaken Salieri already, and already humiliated him. There is nowhere else to go, and nothing left for Salieri to do. He is alone.
Now that I have had the chance to see both versions more than once, and compare the two, I think I would have been happy with something that gave me my beloved 1984 release (only on a DVD that doesn't have to be turned over) and this new director's cut with none of the extended scenes included in the actual movie except for the scene between Constanze and Salieri. The rest could reside happily on a "deleted scenes" feature, and be viewed for fun, but not as part of the finished story. Bigger is not necessarily better, and only that scene made me feel as if here were something intriguing we might have missed. Because when you set aside the gift of Mozart's music it gives to us, the movie, in the end, is really about the all-consuming fire of disappointment, envy, and self-loathing... and one man's struggle with his perceived rejection by his beloved: God.
Copyright © 2005 Sukipot.com