Amadeus

God’s Laughter

Miloš Forman, one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, had emigrated to the United States after Soviet tanks invaded his country in 1968 and, following a period of adjustment, had become an acclaimed director, particularly with his 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which had won five Oscars. In 1984, he would once again surprise audiences with Amadeus.

Miloš Forman avoids all the pitfalls of biographical films, which are almost invariably tedious and full of clichés. Drawing on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play of the same name, Forman favours the artistic freedom of fiction, with less concern for historical accuracy. Shaffer, who had in turn drawn inspiration from Pushkin’s 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, takes as his starting point the perspective of the Italian composer Salieri, Mozart’s contemporary at the Viennese court in the late eighteenth century, consumed by envy of Mozart’s genius. It is Shaffer himself who turns his play into a screenplay tailored to the particular demands of cinematic language and focused on the process of musical creation. The film was an enormous success with audiences and critics alike, eventually winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Art Direction.

The film is structured as a flashback. In 1823, Salieri, confined to an asylum following a suicide attempt, spends hours telling a young priest how he came to be there. Salieri’s voice tells us of his love of music from an early age, as well as his complete devotion to God, to whom he prayed for talent and musical success in exchange for his faith, tireless work and a chaste and scrupulous life. And he felt rewarded by God when he attained the respected position of composer at the Viennese court of Joseph II. Salieri was loved by God!

But then Mozart appears at court, the former child prodigy who had dazzled everyone with his precocious talent and extraordinary virtuosity, and who now reveals himself to be an immature, obscene and ill-mannered young man, with that shrill, uninhibited laugh that punctuates the entire film. And the moment when Mozart transforms the pleasant welcome march Salieri had composed into the beautiful melody that will become part of the aria “Non più andrai” from The Marriage of Figaro marks the beginning of Salieri’s humiliation and suffering, even as he is moved by the genius of the composition.

From this point onwards, Salieri’s envy and wonder at Mozart’s work build to an emotional crescendo, but above all there is rage against God, who granted that unworthy, lascivious creature what he denied Salieri: the genius of music that could only be divine. This is an existential drama and a metaphysical revolt against a God indifferent to his devotion and tireless work, who humiliates him by making his mediocrity plain. How can those scores of Mozart’s, without erasures or corrections, be explained, as though the music were dictated by the divine?!

The film culminates in the scene in which a sick and emotionally exhausted Mozart makes a superhuman effort to compose the magnificent Requiem in D minor, unaware that Salieri wanted to steal the work and kill him. Through the night, Mozart dictates and Salieri, spellbound, writes, and the process of musical creation takes centre stage in the film. Drained of life, Mozart dies and Salieri sees his plan fail. God would rather kill Mozart than allow him, Salieri, a brief moment of glory, condemning him to mediocrity for ever. Throughout the film, music frames the entire emotional confrontation. Mozart’s actual compositions are integrated into the rhythm of the editing and the characters’ reactions and development. All the music was performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner, specifically for use in the film and played exactly as written in the original scores.

Equally striking are the opera scenes, performed live by the orchestra and singers, because Forman wanted to ensure that the physical effort, breathing and muscular tension were visible. Fundamental to this process was the set design — especially in the filming of the operas, almost all at the Teatro de Tyl (Tyl Theatre) in Prague (where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni in 1787) — conceived by the celebrated and innovative Czech artist Josef Svoboda, whose talent brings extraordinary visual and theatrical power to the screen. The extravagant, sumptuous sets in that theatre’s Baroque space, with their painted panels and perspectives, were integrated so that the camera moves dynamically between the illusion of what happens on stage and the reality of the orchestra pit, the audience and the backstage areas. The exquisite choreography of the operas and dances was directed by Twyla Tharp.

To this is added the magnificence of all the sets and costumes, which recreate the political, cultural and artistic milieu of the enlightened despot Joseph II in late eighteenth-century Vienna, although everything was filmed in Czechoslovakia, mainly in Prague. Finally, there is the confrontation between two actors, with F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri with tense precision and
self-imposed restraint, reinforced by austere costumes, opposite Tom Hulce, who gives us an irreverent, unruly Mozart, wearing light-coloured costumes and exuberant wigs.

Everything thus comes together in a film that adopts the viewpoint of Salieri, tortured by the genius of Mozart’s music. But is that not the viewpoint of ordinary mortals when confronted with the genius of those who seem to have been chosen at random by the gods? Can we grasp that, more than love or cruelty, what hangs over us most of the time is God’s laughter?