8 hours ago
7
The pure gorgeous villainy of F Murray Abraham once again floods the screen, as saturnine and sulphurous as ever, in this new rerelease of Amadeus in its original 1984 theatrical cut. It was adapted by Peter Shaffer from his stage-play about the two real-life composers, one a genius, one a nonentity (itself a theme-variation from Pushkin’s 1830 drama Mozart and Salieri), and directed by the great Czech film-maker Miloš Forman – his English-language masterpiece, or maybe his masterpiece full stop. Abraham was in his mid-40s when he played this Oscar-winning role; when I first saw it, I thought he would surely dominate the movies for decades to come, no doubt in classical adaptations in which he would be a superlative Iago or Faustus. For some reason, he never again got a starring role to match this, but he did have a terrific scene-stealer in season two of TV’s The White Lotus, in which he did not seem one day older than in this film.
Abraham’s Antonio Salieri is the court composer of middling saccharine tunes in 18th-century Vienna whose leisured classes gobble his facile work like the chocolate treats he serves to people he wants to seduce. His career and terrible fate are recounted to a solemn priest by the aged Salieri in flashback; he was initially complacently content to regard his success as a reward from God for his bland religious conformity. But – in the film at least – Salieri is an envious, malicious mediocrity and hypocritical time-server, corrosively obsessed by the obvious superiority of the gloriously gifted but ill-mannered newcomer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, played here with many a nitrogen giggle by Tom Hulce. Mozart’s work instantly outpaces his and his genius causes Salieri to petulantly turn against God.
Elizabeth Berridge seductively plays Mozart’s kittenishly devoted wife Constanze, or Stanzi; Roy Dotrice is Mozart’s sternly disapproving father; Jeffrey Jones plays the genial, tolerant Emperor Joseph II with elegant aplomb; and Mozart’s tearful maid Lori is played by the teenage Cynthia Nixon, later to find fame as Miranda in Sex and the City. Simon Callow played Mozart on stage for the play’s London premiere opposite Paul Scofield, and was perhaps chagrined to get only a small role here.
The word “mesmeric” is overused, largely by virtue of being a notorious critics’ euphemism for arthouse films they secretly find dull – but Amadeus really is mesmeric (as well as deliciously exciting) and watching it again I went into exactly the trance I experienced the first time. Abraham’s Salieri, for all his loathing and rage, is Mozart’s sincerest admirer, electrified and dismayed by the brilliance which has effaced his own forgettable efforts. His face is a picture of elaborate courtesy and evil cunning as he pretends to be Mozart’s friend at court. With pure satanic connoisseurship, Salieri sees how it is not merely Mozart’s naivete but his genius which will be his downfall, how his superbly original work will gradually be rejected by simpering high society, how the resulting poverty and depression will erode his health.
And so Salieri conceives his own diabolic masterpiece, greater and more audacious than any of his banal musical work: to exploit Mozart’s shock and guilt at the death of his father (which Salieri has divined from the plot of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni) by arriving at his door like his father’s ghost in a sinister ball-mask, to commission a “requiem” for ready cash which Mozart can hardly refuse. This work will keep alive the psychic wound of despairing guilt which will drive Mozart to his death, music which Salieri plans to pass off as his own at Mozart’s own funeral; an exquisite flourish of dishonest piety.
There are so many superb set-pieces in Amadeus that picking out any individually is almost impossible, but for me the best is Mozart’s first maladroit and nervous arrival in the emperor’s presence. They are surrounded by variously disapproving or admiring courtiers, all intensely aware of the political significance of a new German-speaking genius at the Habsburg court dominated by Italianate culture. Drama school students should study Abraham’s lizardly contempt which pours out of every frame. Salieri has composed a plonkingly uninspired “march of welcome” keyboard piece to be played when Mozart enters and the Emperor, a keen amateur musician, impulsively asks to play it himself as their young guest capers in. What was Salieri’s motive for this? Perhaps he wished to overawe Mozart with this extravagant gesture – or to establish his own primacy as composer at this vital moment. Or perhaps he wished, with machiavellian spite, to tempt Mozart into some brattish display of ingratitude with which he would disgrace himself.
But he could hardly have expected the authentic un-political genius of Mozart’s response: having first insultingly demonstrated that he already knew this fatuous jingle by heart after a single hearing by playing it himself – he then improvises around it, conjuring what is to be a famous aria from The Marriage of Figaro, whose instant catchiness causes the courtiers to gather round. (The film uses Harrison Birtwistle’s original clever reworking of a genuine Salieri composition for this ingenious coup.) Poor Salieri’s face is a mask of rage and pain. His humiliation is almost complete.
The finishing touch comes when at a masked ball (whose disguises are to inspire his hideous revenge) Mozart calls out for suggestions as to who he should pastiche at the keyboard and the incognito Salieri shouts out his own name – and Mozart grinningly thumps out a grotesque parody. Again: what is Salieri’s motive? Pure masochism, maybe. A need to find out the truth, to find out what Mozart really thinks of him and what everyone really thinks – what God thinks, perhaps. To confront the truth about his own lack of talent. There is a kind of integrity in it.
Salieri’s final grim procession down the chaotic hallway of the psychiatric hospital, proclaiming his status as the patron saint of mediocrity is a chilling bravura moment. A treat for the big screen.
