Amadeus: The Power of Genius and Jealousy
By Will Barber-Taylor
Forty years have passed since Peter Shaffer’s triumphant, exalting, enthralling play Amadeus was transformed into an Oscar winning classic. It is a film that is as much about the brilliance of Mozart’s music as it is about the jealousy that surrounds genius.
We all inevitably feel jealous, but it would wrong to distil the relationship between Salieri, played so brilliantly by F Murray Abraham, and Mozart into simple jealousy. Certainly, that is an element to it — one only has to watch the scene when Mozart so superbly upstages Salieri by rewriting his own piece in front of the Austrian Emperor and greatly improving it to see the intense jealous rage Salieri is repressing.
What makes Amadeus into an intriguing character study and a fascinating exploration of the power of music is that Salieri is as baffled by Mozart as he is enraged by him. Constanze’s visit to Salieri with Mozart’s original compositions, utterly lacking in corrections and presented by Constanze in as blithe a way as Mozart seems to Salieri to approach his music causes Salieri both ecstasy and pain. He recognizes that the music is divine, a heavenly event whilst also being totally frustrated by the raw talent of Mozart. Mozart’s genius is to Salieri as inextricably frustrating as an act of God could be. The film deftly plays upon the both the framing device of the confessional and Salieri’s own loss of faith to explore a universal truth — the bitter, nauseating feeling of inadequacy and the pain it creates in those who feel it. The depiction of Salieri’s frustration towards the end of the film as he and Mozart attempt to complete the composition of Requiem in D Minor and he is unable to keep up with the sheer velocity of Mozart’s composition offer us the purest distillation into one scene of the whole driving force of the film. His almost shrill exclamation that “I do not understand!” says it all in one piece of dialogue. We are shown Salieri’s inability to understand Mozart’s process and how seemingly effortlessly the brilliance of his work flows from him.
It is this inner feeling that he lacks something intangible despite his hard work, some spark that could set him apart that lingers with Salieri. Genius is so often seen as a gift and yet in Shaffer’s script, the genius that Mozart has is almost a divine curse, one which causes the maestro’s death and drives Salieri to reject God and also commit murder in the hope of finally gaining the recognition he believes he deserves. Although Salieri slowly realises that Mozart does work incredibly hard, Mozart’s carefree attitude, his seemingly lack of care for his own art is an encapsulation of the idea that genius is not learnt is perhaps not even genetic but comes like a flash of lightning and cannot be learnt, cannot be captured by anyone other than those who are in receipt in it. Salieri’s madness derives not simply from jealously but lack of comprehension — he cannot comprehend how someone as garish as Mozart can produce such astonishingly beautiful music. The air of the Greek tragedy lingers over the film.
Shaffer is therefore mixing, in a way that seems appropriate for the age in which the film is set, Greco-Roman and Christian traditions; whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad certainly applies to Salieri. Like Prometheus he seeks to steal the wisdom of the gods and is damned for it; like Pandora and Arachne, curiosity damns Salieri and Mozart’s ego, his simply blithe failure to see the simmering resentment that lies beneath the sphinx like Salieri that causes his death, not entirely dissimilar to Arachne cursed for all time to spin her webs as a spider.
Within this Greek tragedy is the loss of Salieri’s faith — his desire to exalt himself before the one true God and to make music that would, he thinks, please God drives him to abandon religion, going as far to convincing himself that God would rather kill Mozart than let Salieri take his Requiem for himself to claim as his own composition. The act of confession that is the framing story of the film plays upon the Catholic faith of the era and location in which the film is set. Father Vogler, like the audience, is trapped in the dumb acceptance of Salieri’s crimes because we like Father Vogler are bound by the confessional — we and Father Vogler are one in the same as spectators who cannot intervene in the events as they transpire. Salieri’s declaration that he is the patron saint of mediocrities and as such blesses Vogler being such a mediocrity completes the uncomfortable message that the film is aiming at us — we like Father Vogler, like Salieri, can feel like mediocrities in the face of what can be seen as unattainable genius, genius that Salieri considers to be bestowed upon Mozart by divine intervention and nothing else.
Salieri’s declaration that he is a saint is a ridiculous and mendacious act that signifies how lost he is from any concept of reality but also is almost a repudiation of other saints and martyrs; how much, the film seems to ask us, are they similarly simply witnesses to the glory of God in the same way Salieri considers himself to be a mediocre witness to the power of Mozart’s music? In this act of self-absolution, Salieri is both rejecting religion and embracing it — he sees himself as both a martyr, a tortured victim who is finding peace through his own belief in the power of God and rejecting the very genius he sees as being a product of it. Salieri sees Father Vogler as simply a means to an end — he long ago came to the conclusion that he should not be held responsible for the death of Mozart, but he wishes to affix an official stamp to it. In this Salieri almost wishes God to be witness to his embrace of the trappings of religion and the rejection of any moral structure it may hold — from his act of suicide to his abusing of the confessional, Salieri is in a truly Enlightenment, proto Nietzschean way declaring God to be dead. Whilst Salieri believes God thwarted him in declaring Requiem to be his own, he has survived long enough to tell his story and as such use his tale as a tale of triumph to those he considers to be like himself mediocrities in the face of genius.
The complexities of analysing genius and the jealousy that comes with it thus make Amadeus a film that is so undeniably compelling. Mozart’s declaration that he may be a vulgar man, but his music is not lies at the heart both of the plot and of the fascination that film still engenders. The concept of the art is that the artist who produces it must have the same innate perfection that the art they create does. We see the latest evolution of this on social media; those artists or actors or creators of any kind who do something wrong or express an opinion that differs from our own are labelled as being somehow beyond the pale. They are examples of the enemy to some and regardless of the quality of their work should be treated as such. The need to understand what drives the most brilliant creative instincts can be a truly maddening one and Amadeus perfectly captures the irrationality of human thought when considering this question. For Salieri, formed by his era and upbringing, he can only understand Mozart’s genius in religious terms. For many people today religion is replaced by politics — the politics of the individual must invariably make sense of why they are good or why they are bad. Yet truthfully there is no ultimate answer — we can and will interpret and reinterpret what makes a great artist for centuries to come. And it is that tantalizing truth that will forever compel us to come back to great films, books and music forever more.
