Amadeus (film)

An elderly Antonio Salieri confesses to the murder of his former colleague, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and attempts to kill himself by slitting his throat. Two servants take him to a sanatorium where a priest, Father Vogler, implores him to confess.

Salieri recounts how, even in his youth, he desired to be a composer, much to the chagrin of his father. He prays to God that, if he will make Salieri a famous composer, he will in return promise his faithfulness. Soon after, his father dies, which Salieri takes as a sign that God has accepted his vow. He is educated in Vienna and becomes court composer to Emperor Joseph II.

Mozart arrives in Vienna to perform at the request of his employer, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Salieri attends the performance to meet Mozart and, despite Mozart's obscenity and immaturity, finds his talent to be transcendent.

The Emperor desires to commission Mozart to write an opera and, despite the reservations of his advisers, summons him to the palace. Mozart happily accepts the job, much to the annoyance of Salieri. Mozart premieres Die Entführung aus dem Serail to mixed reviews from the Emperor. Salieri believes that Mozart has slept with the star, Caterina Cavalieri, despite his engagement to Constanze Weber.

The Emperor desires that Mozart instruct his niece, Princess Elisabeth, in music, but Salieri discourages him from doing so. Constanze visits Salieri to persuade him to make the Emperor reconsider, but she is unsuccessful.

Salieri is enraged that God has bestowed upon Mozart the talent he has so desperately desired and vows to destroy Mozart. Mozart, meanwhile, struggles to find work and begins drinking. His father, Leopold Mozart, comes to visit him in Vienna. Constanze and Mozart take Leopold to a masked party (which Salieri also attends), where Mozart entertains the guests with musical antics. Leopold disapproves of his son's hedonism, and the family argues until Leopold leaves town.

Salieri hires a young girl to pose as the Mozarts' maid while spying for him. She takes him to the Mozart residence, where he discovers that Mozart is working on an opera based on the play The Marriage of Figaro, which the Emperor has forbidden. When Mozart is summoned to court to explain, he manages to convince the Emperor to allow his opera to premiere, despite Salieri and the advisers' attempts at sabotage.

Messengers arrive in Vienna with news of Leopold's death, and in response a grief-stricken Mozart pens Don Giovanni. Salieri recognizes the dead commander as symbolic of Leopold and hatches a plan. Wearing Leopold's party mask, Salieri visits Mozart and commissions a Requiem Mass. Salieri plots to kill Mozart once the piece is finished, then premiere it at Mozart's funeral, claiming the work as his own.

At a parody of one of Mozart's own operas, Emanuel Schikaneder asks Mozart to write an opera for his theater. Mozart, desperate for money, obliges, despite Constanze's insistence that he finish the Requiem Mass. The couple fight and Constanze leaves with their young son, Karl.

Mozart collapses during a performance of his finished work, The Magic Flute. Salieri takes him home and offers his assistance on the Requiem. Salieri transcribes Mozart's verbal direction, and they work through the night. The next morning, a gravely ill Mozart apologizes to Salieri for his previous behavior. A guilty Constanze returns home and locks the unfinished Requiem away, only to find that Mozart has died from overwork. Mozart is taken out of the city and unceremoniously buried in a mass grave during a rainstorm. His mourners, daunted by the weather, watch from the city gate as the coffin is taken away.

Having finished his tale, Salieri asks how a merciful God could destroy his own beloved just to keep a mediocrity like Salieri from sharing in his glory. As he is pushed down the hall of the sanatorium in a wheelchair, Salieri declares himself "the patron saint of mediocrities" and mockingly absolves the other patients of their inadequacies. Mozart's high-pitched laugh is heard as the screen fades to black.

In his autobiography Beginning, Kenneth Branagh says that he was one of the finalists for the role of Mozart, but was dropped from consideration when Forman decided to make the film with an American cast.[5]

Mark Hamill, who replaced Tim Curry as Mozart towards the end of the run of the stage play on Broadway, recalled in an interview that he read with many actresses auditioning for Mozart's wife Constanze and after the reads, Forman decided to not cast him because of his association with the character of Luke Skywalker, believing that the audience would not believe him as the composer.[6] Tom Hulce reportedly used John McEnroe's mood swings as a source of inspiration for his portrayal of Mozart's unpredictable genius.[7]

Meg Tilly was cast as Mozart's wife Constanze, but she tore a ligament in her leg the day before shooting started.[7] She was replaced by Elizabeth Berridge. Simon Callow, who played Mozart in the original London stage production of Amadeus, was cast as Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of The Magic Flute.

The film was shot on location in Prague[8] and Kroměříž.[9] Notably, Forman was able to shoot scenes in the Count Nostitz Theatre in Prague, where Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito debuted two centuries before.[10] Several other scenes were shot at the Barrandov Studios.[11]

Forman collaborated with American choreographer Twyla Tharp.[12]

From the beginning, writer Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman both were open about their desire to create entertaining drama only loosely based on reality, calling the work "fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri".[28] This allowed them to carefully pick only interesting historic details or rumors, filling in the rest with dramatic fiction.

The conflict between Mozart and an Italian "cabal" working to block his efforts in Vienna has some historical foundation, insofar as Mozart and his father did write of a belief in such conspiracies to others. Ultimately, however, Mozart and Salieri themselves appear to have been friends.[29]

The idea of animosity between Mozart and Salieri was popularized by Alexander Pushkin in 1830 in a play Mozart and Salieri. In it, Salieri actually murders Mozart on stage. This was made into an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 67 years later,[28] which in turn had its first screen adaptation by silent film director Victor Tourjansky in 1917.

Another significant departure in the film is that Salieri was a married family man with eight children and at least one mistress, not a pious loner trapped in a vow of chastity.[30]

Mozart was indeed commissioned to compose a Requiem Mass by an anonymous benefactor, but that man turned out to be Count Franz von Walsegg, not Salieri disguised as the ghost of Mozart's father.[31]

Amadeus premiered in 1984 as a PG-rated movie with a running time of 161 minutes. Director Miloš Forman introduced an R-rated version with nearly 20 minutes of restored footage. This version was released by the studios as a Director's Cut on September 24, 2002.[32] Forman justified why those scenes were cut in the first place in the 1995 supplemental material for Pioneer's deluxe LaserDisc. However, he explains why the scenes were eventually restored in a subsequent 2002 interview with The A.V. Club:

When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office. And in the '80s, with MTV on the scene, we are having a three-hour film about classical music, with long names and wigs and costumes. Don't forget that no major studio wanted to finance the film, for these reasons. So we said, "Well, we don't want to be pushing the audience's patience too far". Whatever was not directly connected to the plot, I just cut out. But it was a mutual decision [to limit the running time]. I wanted the best life for the film myself... Well, once we are re-releasing it on DVD, it doesn't matter if it is two hours and 40 minutes long, or three hours long. So why don't we do the version as it was written in the script?[33]

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• Amadeus on IMDb
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• Amadeus at AllMovie
• Amadeus at Rotten Tomatoes
• Amadeus at Box Office Mojo
• Analysis of Amadeus – the play and the film
• Amadeus script