The Reluctant Wife and I decided to watch Amadeus again
because I am teaching Abnormal Psychology this semester and the scenes at the beginning and end of the movie where Salieri is being
taken into and then through the madhouse are supposed to be the most accurate
depictions of an insane asylum in the 1700s on film.
I
wasn’t able to find the clip that I wanted as I browsed Youtube, but became intrigued by the
story (again) and proposed it as a Friday night view, and the wife agreed, so
we watched the Director’s Cut courtesy of Amazon.
Boy was this a surprise.
It is still a great film almost 35 years later. But I have always watched it before with my
eyes focused on Mozart. Isn’t the film named after him? Wasn’t he the great musician – perhaps the
greatest of all time? I, like Salieri
(played by F. Murray Abraham, who deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actor for
the role), wanted to know who the person was behind the music – and I wanted to
know the music better. But this viewing
clarified that this not a story about Mozart – the title – Amadeus – taken from
his middle name – means “Love God”. It
is an imperative. And it is this
imperative that Salieri – and to a lesser extent Mozart – fail at.
This film is about envy.
It is not about jealousy, envy’s uptown cousin, which involves a higher
level of psychological functioning and includes the idea that I could have
something like what you have. This is
about the wish to have the thing that you have – and the accompanying belief
that if you have it, I cannot. Salieri
is deeply, toxically, malignantly envious of Mozart’s musical gifts and the
movie revolves around his confession to having killed Mozart – the greatest
musician of his age, and, as I hope to demonstrate, the person who was portrayed
as trying to bring modernity to a world that was mired in ancient mores.
Is the film historically accurate? Even
a cursory Google search reveals that it is not. The intention of the author, as was the case
with Tom Stoppard and Shakespeare
in Love is not to historically accurately depict a person, but to
use someone that has left a legacy to depict an emotion – here, while the
Mozart character (Played by Tom Hulce (Also nominated for Best Actor for his
role – which he played maniacally well, but the subtleties demanded of the
Salieri role made it more deserving)) argues that he is interested in
portraying love on the stage (which is what Stoppard did with Shakespeare), Peter Shaffer is using Mozart as a foil to portray envy – and what it does to the soul of
a person – what it does to Salieri.
Salieri, as a teenager in Italy, makes a pact with God –
that if God will deliver him from his tyrannical and rich father who has no
appreciation of the arts, he will devote his life to serving God by writing
divine music. He swears that he will not
be swayed from this by any temptations – he will foreswear sex, becoming
celibate – and he will donate his services to the poor – spending some of his
time teaching music to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it (though his love
of sweets is something that he can’t give up – and that moral failing emerges
time and time again through the film, underscoring one aspect of the hypocrisy
of Salieri’s pact). When his father
dies, shortly after having made the pact, he undertakes to hold up his end of
the bargain. What a noble man he becomes! Or at least, what a noble man he believes
himself to be! – And all in the service of a God who will grant him what he
wishes.
The problem with the kind of pact that Salieri makes is that
the other entity that has been entered into the contract is frequently unaware that they have signed on for something.
God never said, “OK, I accept,” and it is often the case that we promise
someone – perhaps someone we love from afar, that we will dedicate ourselves to
them. Then, having accomplished what we
promised we would do, we can be surprised when they don’t hold up their end of
the bargain by rewarding us with what we stated would be the result of the
“agreement”. This involves an underlying
fantasy that we are communicating on a higher plane – and that we belong on
that plane. Here, this is obvious with Salieri
believing that his prayer – a prayer that directs God rather than one that
humbly asks God to direct him – has the weight of a commandment. He thinks so highly of himself that he can
direct God. So, when his father dies
shortly after he has made the deal, he takes his father’s death as a sign that
God, who can do these kinds of things, has killed his father: just as you or I might take another’s caring
glance as indication of that person’s interest in us and implicit approval of
the secret pact we have made with them.
So Salieri sets about becoming a musician, and he becomes
the court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor whose sister is none other than
Marie Antoinette. When Mozart shows up
in Salieri’s Vienna, Salieri quickly realizes that Mozart, and not he, is the
one who has been singled out by God to produce divine music. This infuriates Salieri because Mozart, who
is bawdy and crude, who drinks too much and cackles when he laughs, is not
nearly the man that Salieri is, or believes himself to be – and he has clearly
not dedicated himself to God as Salieri has done. But he is a man who knows his gifts, and he exploits
them to get his way – bullying those around him and getting himself deeper and
deeper into debt to support a lifestyle that a teaching position might support, but that
Salieri, because of his envy of Mozart and his power at court, prevents him from securing, all the while pretending to be Mozart's friend.
Salieri, if he had done an honest inventory of his own skills, would
have seen that he was a good, perhaps even a gifted politician. Perhaps not the best politician ever, but a
person who was competent to navigate the court of the Holy Roman Emperor,
something that Mozart was not prepared to do.
In a parallel and very different universe, one in which Salieri’s pact
with God, based on a more powerful faith in his own capacity to be the
instrument that God would choose him to be, would have supported Mozart, God’s
chosen musical vessel, and protected Mozart from evil forces that would have
distracted him from using his gifts for, in this world’s vernacular, the
Greater Glory of God. In this corrupt world - the one we all live in - the opposite occurs. Salieri becomes one of the distractions and, in this rendition, is the lethal rendition.
But Salieri is not a generous soul but rather a selfish one – one who
experiences envy of those who have something that he does not and if he can’t
have what they do, he must sully them – Salieri cheapens Mozart’s relationship
with his wife, undercuts Mozart’s career by shutting down Operas early in their
runs (though the historical record suggests they ran longer than the movie
depicts them to have done), and he ultimately works him, literally, to
death. He is able to kill him, not with
his hands, which in his confession he clarifies would have been difficult to
do, but because Salieri, more than anyone else, understands both that Mozart is
the genius of the age – and something very psychoanalytic – that his music is
not the product of God or of a divine muse – but of the complex and twisted
psychology – the machinations of Mozart’s soul, as it were. By listening closely to Mozart’s music,
and especially his Operas, Salieri sees and feels Mozart’s innermost turmoil
and he is able to play on it, as masterfully as Mozart himself can play the
piano or the violin – to
work Mozart to death – killing the person who has what he cannot. He effectively says, if I can't have it, no one can.
Mozart argues before the Emperor that he must be able to
express what he feels. This democratic
or individual or subjective voice is as threatening to the Emperor as IgnatiusLoyola’s mystic connection with God and ability to help others achieve thatconnection directly was to the Pope, and as threatening as the colonies’declaration of independence was to King George.
The emergence from the dark ages, the renaissance, was both a rebirth of
enlightened thinking, but it also allowed for the emergence of the individual
hero – the person who can articulate him or herself. Freud’s engagement with the unconscious ofhis patients is the next step in this progression – as every man and every
woman can now own themselves in ways that they have not before – they become
their own instrument, tuning their unconscious to support their conscious
intent rather than having it hobble them and keep them enslaved to the mastery
of their parent’s/society’s imposition on them of standards they can’t live up
to.
Mozart’s God is his own father, which Salieri can see – and
perhaps envy. Didn’t he wish for a
father who would have cared for the arts as Mozart’s did? Wouldn’t Salieri have enjoyed being shown off
as a prodigy at all the courts in Europe?
And so isn’t Salieri’s appreciation of the tyranny that this father had
over Mozart – his ability to terrorize him and draw from him his best and most
tortured work – not just ironic but a sign of Salieri’s deep and abiding
humanity? Wouldn't Salieri, unlike Mozart, have loved such a God - such a father? But don't they both fail to love and obey - aren't they both disobedient - as Adam and Eve are in the garden? Isn't there a price to be paid for such disobedience?
The play is set up as a confession. Salieri is confessing the murder of Mozart to
a young and inept priest- a priest who is nowhere near able to hear and
understand his confession – one who cannot effectively confront Salieri's flights of
logic or point out his consistent perversion of a relationship with God to his
own ends. Salieri plays on this –
equating the priest’s ineptitude at solace with his own ineptitude at
music. They are both competent, but
neither is divine. And Salieri’s gift –
as he puts it – is to be the champion of mediocrities; indeed, the patron saint of mediocrities. And isn’t this the terrible identification
that we feel with him – and with the madmen that he absolves of their sin of mediocrity - as we identify with the terrible feeling that we, too, are not able to
reach the rarified air that a genius like Mozart does? As enlightened as we may be, whether by
talent or practice, whether through analysis or LSD, we still fall short of our
goals. Aren't we but mediocrities?
But the tragedy goes deeper - even our heroes – in this
case Mozart – if not worked to death in the play – dies, as he did in real life, of something as silly as
eating rare pork – something that is not tragic but comical – we lose a great
musical mind to bad cooking. In a world that is driven by art - by striving to be more than mediocre - isn't it tragic that both of these men are killed by their own demons and not by chance. Aren't we elevated by being in the presence of men who strive and fail - and fail because of their striving - because of their deeply felt need to address a consuming hunger - whether to assuage the father, as Mozart does - or to punish God the father - as Salieri does. For the tragedy would be that we live in accidental rather than a tragic world - where our passions don't matter - where things occur not because we will them to - often against our better judgement. Wouldn't the real tragedy be that we might be living in world without tragedy, without art, with the lives that history rather than art, has given us. What a tragedy this is work of art is – what an opera. Salieri's mediocrity helps us live amongst the Gods. We can have gratitude for his envy and the ways that we, as post modernists who believe that unlimited vistas are opened for us, cannot, in fact, realize them - so that we, too, feel this thing called envy.
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