Amadeus (1984) Review

An old man in an asylum confesses to murdering Mozart. Almost nothing that follows is historically true and the film does not care, because it is not about Mozart.

It is about Antonio Salieri, a man of real ability who has been given precisely enough talent to recognize greatness in another person and not enough to produce it. That is the cruellest arrangement available and the film knows exactly what it has found.

Peter Shaffer adapted his own stage play, and the change from stage to screen mostly consisted of adding the music as an active participant instead of a subject.

The 9 is for one of the best-written characters in film and a construction that gets richer the more you know about the actual history. The court intrigue sags in the middle and the theatrical cut runs two hours and forty minutes. Neither matters much against what F. Murray Abraham is doing.

The Curse of Being Good Enough

Salieri’s tragedy is not that he lacks talent. He is the court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor, successful, respected across Europe, and genuinely able. His operas were performed and admired.

His tragedy is that he has just enough to hear what Mozart is doing and understand precisely how far beyond him it is. He is the only person at that court equipped to perceive it, and the perception destroys him.

The manuscript scene is the whole film in four minutes. Constanze brings him Mozart’s original scores to secure a position, and Salieri reads them and finds no corrections. Not one. Mozart was writing down music that already existed complete in his head, and Salieri understands what that means while nobody else in the building could.

The camera stays on Abraham’s face while the music rises on the soundtrack, which is the film’s central technique: we hear what he hears, and we watch it cost him.

A man with no ear would have been spared. A man with more talent would have been a rival. Salieri is placed at the exact point of maximum suffering, and Shaffer put him there deliberately.

The other half of the arrangement is that Mozart is vulgar. He giggles, he is crude, he is financially incompetent and socially impossible, and Salieri cannot reconcile the vessel with the contents. His complaint is not against Mozart. It is against God for the choice of instrument.

The Narrator Is Not Reliable

Salieri claims to have killed Mozart, and the film presents the confession as fact within its own frame while giving you every reason to doubt it.

Historically the two men were on cordial terms. Salieri taught Mozart’s son. The alleged confession came very late, in an asylum, from a man in mental and physical decline, and there is no evidence of anything beyond ordinary professional rivalry.

So everything you watch is filtered through a jealous, dying, possibly deluded man constructing himself a role in a story he was largely peripheral to. He would rather be Mozart’s murderer than his footnote, and the film understands that this is a recognizable human preference.

The masked commission for the Requiem is the clearest fabrication and the best invention. It never happened. It is also the perfect expression of what Salieri wants: to be secretly essential to the greatest work, unacknowledged, the hidden author of the thing that killed him.

The last line, in which he absolves all mediocrities and blesses them, is not humility. It is a man appointing himself patron saint of a category so that he is at least the head of something.

Abraham won the Academy Award over Tom Hulce, who was nominated for the same film, which is a neat piece of accidental commentary.

The Music Carries the Argument

The film explains what makes the music great by showing it in use instead of describing it, which is the hardest thing to do in any medium about any art.

Salieri narrates over the Serenade for Winds, telling you exactly what to listen for: the bassoons, the basset horns, the single oboe line that he describes as unfolding. And you hear it, because the piece is playing while he speaks and he has pointed at the right moment.

That sequence is the best writing about music I know of in a film, and the reason it works is that the analysis is specific, technical, and delivered by somebody qualified to give it. Nobody says the music is beautiful. He says what it does.

The Requiem sequence near the end turns composition into a physical process. Mozart dictates, Salieri transcribes, the two of them argue about voicing, and the music assembles on the soundtrack in the order it is being described. It is the best scene about creative work in any film I have seen.

Neville Marriner conducted the whole score on the condition that not a note of Mozart be altered, which is why the music holds up as music instead of film scoring.

Hulce and Abraham both learned to fake conducting and keyboard technique convincingly enough that musicians do not wince, which is rarer than it should be.

Mozart as Written

Tom Hulce’s performance was criticized at the time for the giggle and it is the most misunderstood choice in the film.

Shaffer took it from surviving letters. Mozart’s correspondence is genuinely crude, full of scatological jokes and puns, written by a man who was funny in a juvenile way and entirely unbothered about it. The vulgarity is in the record.

What the film adds is the collision between that and the work. Hulce plays a man who is silly in every room he enters and completely serious the moment he is working, and the switch happens without transition. He giggles at a joke and then dictates four bars.

That is what Salieri cannot forgive. Not the talent, which he could have borne, but that the talent arrived inside somebody with no apparent gravity, no discipline of manner, no evident suffering. God chose a fool as the instrument, and Salieri’s complaint is a theological one.

Hulce also learned enough keyboard to play the passages convincingly, practicing four hours a day, and his conducting was coached to the point where the movements match the score. The seriousness of the preparation is invisible and it is what makes the silliness land.

The scene where he is dying and cannot stop working, dictating the Confutatis while unable to sit up, is the film’s answer to its own question. The gravity was there. It was just never in the room where anybody was looking.

Why It Is Not a Biography

People still object to the historical liberties, and the objection misses what the film is doing. It is a confession by an unreliable narrator, framed as such, in which the historical record is the thing being distorted in front of you.

The real Mozart was not murdered, was not poor at the end in the way the film suggests, and was buried in a common grave because that was standard practice in Vienna at the time instead of because he died destitute and unmourned.

Shaffer built the whole thing from one durable rumour and one genuine emotional truth, which is that most people who work in an art form spend their lives near somebody better and have to decide what to do about it.

The film’s actual subject is professional envy among competent people, which is why it lands with writers, musicians, painters and anybody who has been in a room with talent they cannot match.

Milos Forman shot it in Prague because Vienna had modernised and Prague still had eighteenth-century streets and the Count Nostitz theatre, where Don Giovanni had premiered. So some of the performance scenes happen in the actual room.

The director’s cut adds twenty minutes, including a scene where Constanze offers herself to Salieri and he humiliates her. It is stronger material and it makes the film longer than most people want it.

Should you watch Amadeus?

Yes, and watch the theatrical cut first at two hours forty. Do not go in expecting history. Go in expecting the best film ever made about being the second most talented person in the room, which is a position most people occupy and few films examine.

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