From the Archives: “The Music of Mozart, the Magic of the Film Maker”

To be able to perceive genius, to luxuriate in its example, all the while knowing that one’s own work would have to strain to reach mediocrity is a pretty good working definition of hell on earth.

In “Amadeus” (UA Coronet, Newport Cinema), Peter Shaffer’s play, which he and director Milos Forman have turned into an enthralling film, the genius is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the “mediocrity” is Antonio Salieri — reigning success of the court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria in the late 18th century — and the confrontation between the two is fatal.

The story is told in the framework of a memory by the very old Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), consigned to a madhouse after his attempted suicide. He has outlived Mozart (Tom Hulce) by 32 years, and watched his own compositions wither in popularity during that time.

To the devout young Salieri, who had dedicated his very chastity to music as a boy, the even younger Mozart was his idol. For almost 20 years Salieri has listened, enraptured, to Mozart’s extraordinary output, from the time the 6-year-old prodigy was trundled about by his father from court to salon, to perform like a musical lap dog.

Their first encounter leaves the Italian thunderstruck. It is at the splendid residence of the Archbishop of Salzburg, who has become the adult Mozart’s employer. There Salieri discovers his god: with the rising giggle of an Ipswich barmaid, sliding on his satin knee britches under a buffet table, sniggering dirty words in hot pursuit of a young and common girl more than half out of her dress and knickers.

To make matters worse, the music he scrambles off to conduct is the most sublime Salieri has yet heard. (It the adagio from the Wind Serenade for 13 Instruments, and for the benefit or those non-musicians of us in the audience, Salieri dissects its elements as it is played, making it entirely accessible.)

And so a lethal impasse begins. At first only scandalized by the spectacle of Mozart as braying, scatological and tactless, Salieri finally decides that Mozart, whose music is so obviously God-given, is so thoroughly unworthy of God’s favors that he must be thwarted at every turn.

It’s a theatrical conceit that doesn’t exactly hold together, since Mozart all on his own was eminently capable of thwarting offers that, at the least, would give him security, and at the most might add prestige into the bargain.

But Shaffer does not pretend this is a biography of Mozart; he calls it a “fantasia on fact,” and taken in that frank vein, it is bewitching.

First, it has Mozart’s music threaded lavishly through it, and its interpolation into the action is subtle and masterful.

Watch the way Forman stages the scene that finally breaks Salieri. Constanze, (Elizabeth Berridge), she of the floor-play, is now Mozart’s wife. They are, as usual, living well over his income, but her husband will not stoop to submitting a sample of his work for the plum appointment as teacher to Emperor Joseph’s niece. So the loyal, and sweetly dim wife has gathered up armfuls of her husband’s work to show to Salieri.

This could be one of the more boring scenes extant (“Salieri slowly picks out the themes on his piano, hums snatches of others, looks impressed”), but the filmmaker’s invention is beyond that. Salieri looks at this miscellany — the Kyrie from the C-minor Mass, the slow movement from the Flute and Harp Concerto, and more — and as he does, each theme wafts out to us. It becomes a sublime patchwork of melodies.

What Salieri sees, to his horror, is page after page of first drafts with no corrections whatever, making him believe that Mozart had some sort of automatic writing arrangement with God(?!?). It is at this point that he decides to block genius wherever he can.

After its musical core, the second joy of “Amadeus” is that a great deal of it was photographed (meltingly, by veteran Forman cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek) in Prague, standing in for Vienna.

We are allowed into the actual Tyl Theater, where Mozart himself conducted the first of the only five performances his “Don Giovanni” received during his lifetime, for the final, harrowing scenes of that opera, as well as scenes from “Abduction From the Seraglio” and “The Marriage of Figaro,”

We get a sense of what Shakespeare’s Globe was to the Elizabethans in the lusty Schikaneder Theatre, a people’s theater where ribald parodies of Mozart’s operas packed the house, and Forman lets everything rip: papier-mache horses, real horses, gods and sopranos from machines, dwarfs and enough pretty girls to populate a year’s worth of burlesque.

The film’s details are exquisite: Its production design (Patrizia von Brandenstein), editing (Nena Danevic, Michael Chandler), costuming (Theodor Pistek), opera’s set design (Josef Svoboda), the opera’s quaint ballets (Twyla Tharp) and the music, coordinated by John Strauss and conducted and supervised by Mozart specialist Neville Marriner and his Academy of St. Martin in the Fields orchestra. And it is made on so lavish a scale as to make you think you have died and gone back to the Golden Age of Moviemaking.

Every member of the cast is exceptional. To begin a little off center, there is Jeffrey Jones’ earnestly tin-eared Emperor, a mouthpiece of royal banality, in a performance both humorous and sly. Elizabeth Berridge’s Constanze grows from callowness to a too-early maturity, thanks to the utter improvidence of her boy-husband, and it is a depressing and well-acted transition.

Watching F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri at first makes you miss Ian McKellen’s vicious virtuosity, and the moments when Abraham looks like a bewigged Mel Brooks are unsettling. But he has two scenes that cannot be bettered — the manuscript scene with Constanze, and a new final scene in which the barely alive Mozart dictates his Requiem Mass.

By this time, Hulce has entirely grown on us. If he is never exactly credible as the assured conductor/creator of this music, he is certainly touching in the film’s last third, during Mozart’s swift and dreadful decline. And the burial scene that closes the film (or closes it emotionally) is one of the most bitterly tragic scenes in filmmaking memory, as the small, cloth wrapped body is given a sprinkling of quicklime and consigned to a common grave, that grave “not even marked with a bad inscription.”