Mozart holds up. Does Amadeus?

Fran Magazine: Issue #116

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Too many notes on Amadeus

I saw Miloš Forman’s Amadeus for the first time at the behest of my dad. Why did my dad think it was a good idea to show me Amadeus? It’s been suggested to me by multiple people, none of whom know each other, that “dads” (broadly speaking) “love Amadeus.” Is this true? Fathers, sound off in the chat. 👇🏻 More likely, he thought it was a good idea because he had a preteen child involved in every possible non-singing musical extracurricular imaginable and few non-musical outlets through which I could learn or understand anything about classical music. Forman’s film, an adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name, tells the story of a mostly fictional rivalry between the Italian composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) in 18th century Vienna. However old I was, the beginning of the film — in which Salieri inflicts bloody self-harm before being committed to an asylum for guys who monologue about what they’ve done to a friendly neighborhood priest (not to mention the Dick Smith old-age prosthetics on Abraham’s face) before the film careens into a loud immaturity — was too gross and off-putting to me as a self-conscious and self-hating preteen and I turned it off about forty minutes in.

I eventually watched all of the film sometime in college, maybe my junior year, and I’ve regularly rewatched every few years out of sheer creature comfort. I last saw it in 2022 to go on the Bright Wall/Dark Room podcast where I undoubtedly said at least one kind of smart thing and one kind of stupid thing¹, and also called it the best movie of all time.² The new 4K restoration is playing at IFC this week, so I rallied the energy to go and see if, especially because I’d never seen the film on a big screen. Amadeus is not really an underrated movie by any stretch of the imagination, but our screening was not exactly well populated. I realized early on into the film that we were also watching the theatrical cut, which — while still good — lacks some of the depth of the R-rated director’s cut.

copyright warner bros

The movie has always had a reputation for an ‘80s glam(ish) rock(ish) aesthetic, though it is much more lush and period-appropriate and rococo than otherwise given credit for. The anachronisms come in the dialogue — Shaffer’s play — which imagines that people in the 1780s said stuff like, “uh, I don’t know” more than the average modern person would think that they did. Amadeus’s vision of Mozart is that of a rude, childish vulgarian — proud and annoying — upending the Italian-inspired arts scene of Vienna, stomping in the face of all that Salieri — stoic, spiteful, devout, kind of — has stood up for. As my friend Morgan points out, it is essential to the film that Mozart is played by an American (I’d go one step further and say it’s essential to the film that Mozart is played by someone from Michigan). The latter conspires to kill the former, something that did not happen. I’m not really here to debate the accuracies of the play, which I would say is 85% fictional. Though Mozart was increasingly paranoid in the later years of his life — his 30s, to be clear — he likely died of syphilis or strep throat (OR MONO???³). Salieri probably did not really give a fuck about Mozart beyond the extent to which Mozart was kind of a party trick figure — good for building a crowd — and also brought forth a wave of Germanic opera that negated the Italian style that had been so popular for decades, if not centuries, across Europe. If anything feels especially accurate to the “truth” of Mozart, it’s that of some of his vulgarity, especially present in his personal life. I went to Mozart’s birth house in Salzburg six years ago where they have a number of his letters to and from his wife Constanze that are full of dirty jokes and unabashed lust for one another. Refreshing, I thought then and now.

Part of the film’s enduring appeal is the quality of the performances — F. Murray Abraham’s slick, conspiratorial obsession, Tom Hulce’s magnetic enthusiasm, Elizabeth Berridge’s steely concern, to say nothing of small parts played by Simon Callow (looking really hot?) and Cynthia Nixon and Jeffrey Jones (admittedly great here). I’ve always liked that the film feels like an impression of a “Hollywood movie” without having especially Hollywood actors involved. There’s an undeniable pleasure to watching these people go around and bicker and discuss music and eat little treats in big costumes and bigger sets.

I was not especially surprised to see Richard Brody remark upon his own dislike of the film⁴, especially because the film has “no idea how to present a real artist with insight and without condescension or infantilization.” To some extent, I think this is more a fault of the Shaffer play than the Forman film, but beyond that I’m not sure I ever saw Amadeus as a text about how a real artist is or works. A common complaint that exists in Great Artist Biopics — besides “fake nose??” — is that we don’t ever get a sense of how they worked or what made them genius. There are a handful of movies that buck this trend, sure (Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is surprisingly and beautiful astute about how art and Turner’s paintings “work,” if you’re not too distracted by Spall’s performance), but I remember vague complaints around Maestro (a worse movie than Amadeus) that are like, “I have no further understanding of Bernstein and why he was famous than when I sat down in the theater.” Respectfully, that’s a skill issue.

The appeal of Amadeus to me is that it is less about real artistry and more about the elusive quality of artistry. What struck me on this rewatch is the dedicated quality of Salieri’s attendance at all of Mozart’s operas. It’s not just that he admires Mozart, but he is obsessed with figuring out the trick. Amadeus is much more in line with a movie like The Prestige than it is Maestro or TÁR or Mr. Turner — the first two are “prank war gone wrong” more than they are an exploration of artistic form and function. Amadeus is more of a crash course in Mozart cultural appreciation — “these songs slap!” the movie baits you into thinking — than it is an acknowledgement of the functionality of Mozart’s applied genius. Salieri views both his declining reputation and inability to recreate Mozart’s productivity or inspiration as a sign that God has rebuked him. He can only credit Mozart’s genius as that of divine intervention. This is present in the bits of opera we get: grandiose, spectacular, bold. The film otherwise mostly obscures Mozart’s work to us, that is, the process of him doing the work it takes to compose. The closest we get is the scene in which Mozart “fixes” Salieri’s welcome march, a casual edit session, and also in one of the film’s final scenes in which Salieri just starts to put the pieces together as Mozart is dying.

What is most compelling to me as a filmgoer and classical music fan these days is that most of the film’s — and the general public’s — admiration for Mozart’s work is that of his opera (and his funeral mass, which he left unfinished both in the film and in life). Mozart’s status as an opera composer is still fairly unrivaled: the Met Opera is showing three Mozart operas in this forthcoming season, one last season, and three in the season before. That’s a lot! But you don’t see a ton of Mozart symphonies or concertos played these days, nor does the film acknowledge the extent to which Mozart was composing those as well. When I was growing up and playing music in youth symphonies prior to my time playing in high school and college, we basically never played Mozart. I knew his music from piano, mostly, where he was considered a rudimentary stepping stone from basic melodies, scales, and theory to the works of Bach or Chopin.

I more or less taught myself to like the music of Mozart when I was in college for no other reason than it felt inappropriate that I was otherwise fairly unfamiliar. While Romantic and Modernist music dominated the programming of my college orchestra, I listened through all forty-one Mozart symphonies and several piano concertos to try to see what it was that bridged classical music from the divine quality of the Baroque era to the almost mathematical precision of the Classical. This most recent viewing of Amadeus was the first time that I caught my favorite — No. 29 — humming along in the background of a scene.

While a number of Mozart symphonies burst onto the scene with a fury of notes and arpeggios, Symphony No. 29 presents itself with a kind of faux humility I’ve always found charming. Its opening theme, upon which the piece continues to build across twenty-something minutes, has a simple “aw shucks” quality, connoted in going down rather than building up. It’s an especially hummable melody, which doesn’t necessarily make for quality, but it doesn’t hurt either. Mozart composed this at eighteen, and more than many of his later symphonies, there’s room for pause in the piece. He plays with silence, resting. There are stretches, especially across the fourth movement, that feel like the strings are skipping, jumping over notes or eluding a key part of melody completely. Amadeus jokes that his music has too many notes; here, Mozart seems to say that he’s still gonna do a lot of notes but he’ll skip some where you least expect it rather than do less overall. You feel the absence of these notes, filling them in yourself rather than letting him do all the work.

Even after all these years of listening to Mozart, training my ear to appreciate what he is doing though I still prefer my Romantics, I still don’t think I really get Mozart either. I mean, I understand it, sure, but there is an elusive quality to the work that feels distant and withholding. It’s not especially emotional work, though it can be sometimes. In opera, you can compare the music and the libretto, see how the two complement each other. Without the lyrics, you’re left with seemingly limitless melodies, notes stacking and tripling and jumping all over each other. How does he know how far it should go? Where does he know to break or stop? Mozart is inventing a system in real time; to listen to him is not unlike when people who love math tell you that math is really beautiful if you know how to look at it. Perhaps what’s elusive about Mozart’s work is present in his age and immaturity: he was young enough when he died that he hadn’t gotten all of it out of his system yet. There was more to build upon, more to develop. What we’re left with are gestures and impressions — genius, sure, but one whose work suggests the best was yet to come. Maybe that’s what the movie really gets wrong. To listen to Mozart is less a consideration of how, and more what if?

1. I functionally black out every single time I do a podcast and I no longer re-listen to hear what I said out of fear of further embarrassment. If you’ve ever asked me to do your podcast and I said no, this is why.

2. Okay, so two stupid things. Obviously this is not true because we now know the best movie of all time is J. Lee Thompson’s What a Way to Go!

3. No evidence of this, btw… but putting it out there nonetheless…

4. More than a number of films I love unabashedly, the seams of this one are very visible… though I find it undeniable, there are plenty of ways to deny it.