Ramblings on the origins of "Amadeus," and some contradictory advice from a real Beaumarchais and a fictional Beaumarchais

The following is my contribution to the Amadeus blogathon conceived and convened by the critic Bilge Ebiri; see here for details.

It won’t do to refer to Milos Forman’s 1984 Amadeus as an Oscar-bait movie; yes, the picture was much “honored” with nominations and statuettes, but its early production history strongly indicates that it was at a certain point a movie no one really wanted to make. Calling it a piece of “white elephant” art, even for the sake of contradicting that categorization, not only muddies the waters but it apt to open a can of worms pertaining to the lack of scientific accuracy in the Farber-inspired method of criticism, sigh. The point that I am interested in proving, and which tempts me with respect to the above-cited terminology, is that Amadeus is the most seriously ironical motion picture of its kind. No, Forman does not take the film to the absurdist/surrealist heights of his Czech The Fireman’s Ball, from 1967; and being that its very subject is Great Art/The Great Artist to begin with, it can’t begin to even find some of the Pataphysical implications of Forman’s earlier work. But as costume dramas go, Forman’s cinematizing of Peter Shaffer’s eloquent but rather more conventional-in-perspective play is replete with bits of near-absurdist bite; sometimes they're moments of slapstick (the way Salieri falls out of the bed when Constanze walks in on he and Mozart sleeping off a night of working on the “Requiem”), and the tang is always there in the way Amadeus portrays Salieri’s piety as both hateful and tedious. (How many times, throughout his story, does Salieri refer to some event or other as “a miracle” or something that “changed” his life “forever?” I gave up counting about 90 minutes into my last viewing.) Forman’s detachment—the film’s refusal to even imply a contradiction between Mozart’s boisterous boorishness and his musical genius—in a sense almost goes against Sir Peter Hall’s explications of the play’s theme: “[Amadeus] asks why God would seem to bestow genius so indiscriminately, indifferent to morality or human decency.” In the film the indecency is almost all Salieri’s, particularly in the “Director’s Cut” version of the film, in which the abortive “exchange” between Constanze and Salieri is drawn out in a more explicit way than in the play, heightening Constanze’s entirely gratuitous humiliation at Salieri’s hands.

These various emphases become more intriguing the further back one goes in looking at the work, from the film to the play (and Shaffer revised the play several times on several occasions, and each revision received its own acclaimed and popular production; Hall notes that “Scholars will have a merry time with the text of Amadeus in the future”) and back to Alexander Pushkin’s blank-verse mini-drama of 1831 Mozart and Salieri, which makes the question of why genius is bestowed indiscriminately solely a concern of Salieri’s, and not much of a concern at that. Rather, the playlet is a demonstration of envy in deadly action, Salieri bowing and cajoling Mozart, telling him to buck up before poisoning him. Pushkin composed the piece a few years after Salieri’s death, inspired by Salieri’s own dementia-driven “confession” of killing Mozart. The Pushkin piece also makes reference to the “mysterious” commission of Mozart’s “Requiem.” In their Pushkin tavern encounter, Mozart recounts a meeting (this is from Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of the poem): “a man, black-coated, with a courteous bow,/ordered a requiem and disappeared./So I set down and started writing.” He then complains to Salieri: “I am haunted by that man, that man in black./He never leaves me day or night. He follows/behind me like a shadow[…]” 

This mystery commission is based on an apparently true and fantastical story, involving a wealthy “patron” and a stratagem on that individual’s part to pass off a Mozart work as his own. In Pushkin’s work, the black-coated man takes the symbological weight of the death that Salieri will soon inflict on his “rival.” Shaffer, particularly in working with Forman to script the film version of the play, took both the anecdote and the Pushkin-contrived symbolic weight and ran with it, concocting both a Freudian daddy-issue theme (which is also threaded through the interpretation of the Stone Guest climax of Don Giovanni) and a Salieri-as-potential-plagiarist one.

Largely missing throughout both the play’s and the film’s discussions of various Mozart works are…the librettists. It’s almost as if musical history has its own hierarchical variant on an auteur theory. When Mozart scandalizes the court by proposing an opera of The Marriage of Figaro, the original playwright Beaumarchais warrants a mention, but not only is actual librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte not a character in either the play or the film, his name never even comes up. Apparently collaboration is not a salient feature of genius as it is manifested in these cosmos.

Mention of Beaumarchais, in the film, sets off some fretting on the part of the established order, and Jeffrey Jones’ Emperor Joseph II makes reference to the subversive ideas sweeping France and how worrying they are to his sister, “Antoinette,” nudge-nudge wink-wink. (Ideas aside, Marie was reportedly a fan of Figaro and objected to her husband’s ban on the work.) In the Pushkin work (I will once again turn to Nabokov’s translation), Beaumarchais is evoked by Salieri in an attempt to buck up the gloomy Mozart (and again, this can’t be emphasized enough, this is prior to Salieri putting poison in Wolfgang’s grog). 

Salieri

            Come, come! What childish terrors!

Dispel those hollow fancies, Beaumarchais

was wont to say to me: “Look here, old friend

when black thoughts trouble you, uncork a bottle

of bright champagne, or reread ‘Figaro.’”

 

Mozart

Yes, you and Beaumarchais were boon companions,

of course—you wrote “Tarare” for Beaumarchais.

A splendid piece—especially one tune—

I always find I hum it when I’m gay:

Ta-tá, ta-tá…Salieri, was it true

That Beaumarchais once poisoned someone?

 

Salieri

                                                            No:

I doubt it. He was much too droll a fellow

For such a trade.

“It is curious to note,” Nabokov writes in his commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, how different the advice Pushkin has Beaumarchais give to Salieri, given the advice Beaumarchais himself gives in his own introduction to The Barber of Seville: “Si votre diner fut mauvais…ah! Laissez mon Barbier…parcourez les chefs-ouevres de Tissot sur le temperance[…].” (“If you had a bad dinner, leave my Barber be, and instead explore Tissot’s masterpieces on temperance […],” translation GK; Tissot was a famed Swiss doctor of the 18^th century.) Which opens the question as to whether Salieri is deliberately proffering the “wrong” advice to “friend” Mozart. At the end of Pushkin’s poem, Salieri, alone, having done the deed, muses on Mozart’s prior observation that villainy and genius are “two things that do not go together.”:

                                                        Wait:

that’s false—for surely there was Buonarrati.

—Or is that but a legend, but a lie,

bred by the stupid mob, by their inane

vulgarity, and that great soul who wrought

the Vatican had never sunk to murder?

Comments

[Gordon Cameron]

>Largely missing throughout both the play’s and the film’s discussions of various Mozart works are…the librettists. It’s almost as if musical history has its own hierarchical variant on an auteur theory. When Mozart scandalizes the court by proposing an opera of The Marriage of Figaro, the original playwright Beaumarchais warrants a mention, but not only is actual librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte not a character in either the play or the film, his name never even comes up. Apparently collaboration is not a salient feature of genius as it is manifested in these cosmos.

Yes, but consider the Mozart/Schikaneder relationship in the film. Not only his his libretto specifically discussed (by Constanze, who derides it as 'ridiculous'), but he's depicted as an aesthetic influence on Mozart. He brings out an earthier side to Mozart's work (hinted at earlier when Mozart complains to the emperor, 'who wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules?), tells him at the vaudeville theater that 'you belong here, not at the snobby court,' and is seen actively participating in a rehearsal/party with the 'Magic Flute' cast. I think his powerful presence is as much worth commenting on as the absence of Da Ponte -- can't some of this disparity be accounted for by the fact that there's only so much you can cram into a single play/movie if you want to retain a realistic running time? Incidentally, the film does interesting things with the Earthy/Celestial, Life/Death dichotomy between Schikaneder and Salieri in the third act. Mozart confuses them when he hears ominous knocks at the door, and works himself to death to fulfill both of their commissions; and in a splendid bit of music editing, the playful overture to 'The Magic Flute' is merged with the terrifying 'Rex Tremendae' from the Requiem.

(I also love the bit where the shrill mother-in-law morphs into the Queen of the Night, but that's another matter...)

[Victor Morton]

Thanks for joining in the AMADEUS blog-a-thon, Glenn. I'll have a fresh piece later in the week.

But for now, since you mention Lorenzo DaPonte, let me point out Carlos Saura's recent I, DON GIOVANNI, in which DaPonte is the central figure. In this version of non-history, the inspiration for DON GIOVANNI is Lorenzo's apparently legendary promiscuity, which got him exiled from Venice. And again, a scheming Salieri is the villain of the piece (he does the "good deed" of pulling strings to get DaPonte the commission with Mozart, convinced it'll never work and wreck Mozart). I like IDG quite a bit (never made US commercial distribution), but it's no AMADEUS.

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Slightly off-topic, but it makes me very sad that so many smart people only know Pushkin through Nabokov's terrible translations! Pushkin's poetry is like Mozart in verse---fast and breezy, but endlessly complex, and just plain pleasurable. Nabokov was a great writer, but he had an elaborate theory of translation which held that the word was more important than the line, and that attempts to make translations enjoyable are a betrayal of the translation's heavy lifting. So he produced translations that are useful as a crib for reading the Russian, but horrifically inaccurate when it comes to conveying the literary accomplishment of the source material---his Onegin makes on of the most purely enjoyable poems ever written feel like a thudding, ponderous mess. Seriously, there's loads of Pushkin translations out there, and just about any of them will give you a better feel for the bounce of his line, and the snappiness of his dialogue.

[Mark Slutsky]

What I love about AMADEUS is that Salieri isn't Mozart's arch-rival or enemy; he's his biggest fan... and perhaps the only person who truly comprehends his genius. It's beautiful.

[Glenn Kenny]

The grim elaborateness of his translation theory notwithstanding, VN made no bones about the blocky ugliness of his "Englished" Russian poems and almost admitted the effect was deliberate, the better to push the reader to learn Russian. I'm not gonna get into any kind of discussion of the issues raised in the above comment but since my points were all "content" based I figures VN's Pushkin would "do."

[David Ehrenstein]

Interesting that you bring this up because I was reminded of "Amadeus" by the recent, egregious "Anonymous." In Forman's film Mozart crude robustness is as one with his musical genius. In the Emmerich class snobbery conquers all Shakespeare "couldn't have been so low bred" so the Oxfordian's created a whole system of utter nonsense that the film goes for hook line and sinker to make him an aristocrat. It's Shakespeare is a crude lout thus "proving their point."

FEH!

Forman has recently appeared as Catherine Deneuve's love interest in Christophe Honore's new musical "Les Bien-Aimes."

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Oh yeah---Nabokov was always plenty up-front about his translations' ugliness, and it's certainly an appropriate choice here, where you're trying to get pure sense across. It just makes me sad that a lot of highly literate folks who aren't inclined to learn Russian think, "I'd like to try this Pushkin---let me find a good translation. Nabokov! He's a fine writer, this should be great!" And then they come away thinking this infinitely graceful poet wrote thudding, ugly verse, and don't see what the big deal is. It's especially painful in the verse dramas, where the liquid line of the dialogue is a big part of the effect.

[bill]

And how about that Elizabeth Berridge, am I right fellows? Eh? Eh???

I'll show myself out.

[Brian Dauth]

One aspect of AMADEUS that has always struck me as being consistent with Forman’s other films is the presentation of the individual as under the pressure of the state/authority to conform. Amadeus/Salieri is McMurphy/Nurse Ratched in a different timeframe/place. Forman is interested in how the individual is under the surveillance of the state which is trying either to suppress her freedom/expression or to co-opt it. Forman brings a political element to the film, and I love the scene he created with Shaffer where Salieri, court composer and state agent, takes down the Requiem in his own hand to claim it for himself (and, by extension, the state). Mozart’s laugh on the soundtrack at the end is like Chief Bromden breaking out of the asylum, though a far bleaker conclusion more in keeping with THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT.

It is also interesting how AMADEUS is EQUUS (and THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN) all over again with the quester after the divine – Dysart/Salieri – eventually destroying the person they feel is touched by the divine – Dysart does it in an attempt to cure Alan Strang, while Salieri does it from envy and anger. Shaffer revisions to the play subsequent to the film de-emphasize the political elements that were introduced by Forman.

[Brian Dauth]

One additional thought:

In Tim Grierson's post he writes: "I still consider this the superior version of Amadeus [the later revision], although I have great admiration for the film, which I initially caught in its 'director's cut' version during its 2002 theatrical run. The reason why I prefer the stage version is that I think it drives home the work's essential point: Like it or not, we're all Salieri."

For me, this is the major difference between Forman's vision and Shaffer's. For Shaffer, we are all Salieri's (Dysart at the end of EQUUS says that the bit will not come out [of his mouth]). Forman, however, shows that a person is only a Salieri if she aligns herself with the state. Mozart's laugh contradict's Salieri's luxurious sense of martyrdom: God doesn't divide the world between Mozarts and mediocrities -- one has to make certain choices in order to become a mediocrity. In parallel ways, Lumet in EQUUS and Forman in AMADEUS subvert/critique Shaffer's vision of the world.