Amadeus – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Realizes What Can Be Done For the Love of God

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.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...