# Amadeus?



## SarahNorthman

I know it is far from historically accurate but how do y'all feel about it? Its honestly as odd as it may sound one of my favorite childhood movies. As far as the whole Mozart and Salieri hating each other and Salieri ultimately killing Mozart out of what was essentially jealousy. I believe Hollywood took these theories for dramas sake. As we all know they have been largely debunked. Of course I am far from an expert on the matter. Just curious to see what y'all think.

Sarah


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## SeptimalTritone

Amadeus is like one of the best movies ever!


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde

Read the play maybe a dozen times and the movie about half that. It's an amazing story! Really well crafted and I would love to see it done in a theatre. The whole background of "salieri killing mozart" as a story concept dates back to the first half of the 19th century, but Amadeus would clearly be the best remembered version (both movie and play).


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## elgar's ghost

Let's just consider ourselves lucky that Ken Russell didn't direct it.


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## ptr

..its pure fictional entertainment, and for Hollywood, a quite entertaining flic!

/ptr


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## DavidA

Great movie with one of the best soundtracks ever! The Director's Cut makes more sense actually and is worth seeing. As long as we realise that the picture painted of Mozart and Salieri is mostly pure fiction and has little basis in fact.


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## Headphone Hermit

elgars ghost said:


> Let's just consider ourselves lucky that Ken Russell didn't direct it.


Agreed!

In addition, I consider myself lucky to have a TV with an 'off' button :tiphat:


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## hpowders

It's a dramatization based on Salieri's point of view and all the guilt he supposedly felt. None of it substantiated.

See "Noah" for the rain.

See "Amadeus" for the music.


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## SarahNorthman

I have to wonder if perhaps in the movie maybe elderly Salieri wasn't all there? If maybe he was kind of driven a bit mad by guilt?


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## SeptimalTritone

SarahNorthman said:


> I have to wonder if perhaps in the movie maybe elderly Salieri wasn't all there? If maybe he was kind of driven a bit mad by guilt?


I think he was more driven mad by how Mozart killed _him_. SONNET CLV's excellent post:



SONNET CLV said:


> Of course, the real point of _Amadeus_, the stage play by Peter Shaffer from which the movie was scripted, is irony. It wasn't Salieri who killed Mozart; it was Mozart who killed Salieri, musically. (I still recall the days before the movie came out when only a handful, if that, of discs of Salieri's music existed. There was a resurgence after the film came out, and Salieri did well for it. Another irony.) Throughout the play it seems the only person who really understands what Mozart is (a remarkable genius who will command music for centuries) is the hapless Salieri who alone knows that his own "art" has just become worthless due to the musical antics of this young upstart. It's kind of sad, too. We get a picture of the "old man" Salieri's entire world being uprooted by the young Mozart. In actuality, Salieri was only six years older than Mozart, and since he wasn't as precocious, he was blossoming at about the same time as was Mozart. Of course there is much difference in the talent levels of the two, but poor Salieri was no slouch, as is evidenced by the music he wrote. Again, sadly, in the film version is the scene where young Mozart improvises in the styles of several popular composers of the day, and when Salieri is named, Mozart plays a very clunky, awkward piece. Very unfair to the poor guy. But the point still stands that the irony of the film is that Mozart, the composer of remarkable genius, kills Salieri's chances to be heard in the future. But then, Mozart killed everybody's chances, which is why the "contemporaries of Mozart" are known as "the contemporaries of Mozart" and are generally recorded for curiosity value rather than musical merit. (I know. I've collected several of those "contemporaries of Mozart" recordings.)
> 
> The truth is, Mozart was killed when Thelonious Monk, who will be resurrected in the 22nd century and sent back to 18th century Austria via a newly invented time machine, played a dominant seventh flattened fifth chord for Mozart whose sensibilities then became bent out of shape by his frustruation with the locrian mode and his inability to fit it properly into the _Requiem_ he was currently working on, and he expired on the spot. (I don't know what ever happened to the time-travelled, reanimated Thelonius Monk, but I suspect he may have gone on to become the young Beethoven's piano teacher.)


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## Albert7

elgars ghost said:


> Let's just consider ourselves lucky that Ken Russell didn't direct it.


Hey! No insulting one of my favorite all time directors.


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## SarahNorthman

SeptimalTritone said:


> I think he was more driven mad by how Mozart killed _him_. SONNET CLV's excellent post:


I had never considered this. I have never seen the play, but now that I think about it they do drop those hints at the beginning and end of the movie.


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## Iggy

Haven't seen it in a long time, but I remember always placing it in my Top 5-10 movies of all time when I used to be a movie buff.


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## elgar's ghost

albertfallickwang said:


> Hey! No insulting one of my favorite all time directors.


Heh heh... No offence meant, Albert - it's just that I think his silver screen forays into the classical world often left too much to be desired.


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## Guest

I saw the stage play once--it was superior to the infantile movie.


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## Delicious Manager

It's an entertaining film with a few carefully-disguised historically accurate facts hidden within it. I enjoy it for what it is and, of course, for that GLORIOUS soundtrack.


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## JACE

I've watched it a few times, and I've always enjoyed it.


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## ahammel

I like it quite a lot. I should watch it again some time.

People overplay the historical inaccuracy, I think. It's a secret history: in reality Mozart and Salieri got along well and respected one another. That's true in the movie as well _as far as anybody but Salieri knows._

Some of the other nonsense (Mozart not making copies and composing away from the keyboard) are more down to the scholarship available at the time than to the film makers making stuff up.


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## PlaySalieri

DavidA said:


> Great movie with one of the best soundtracks ever! The Director's Cut makes more sense actually and is worth seeing. As long as we realise that the picture painted of Mozart and Salieri is mostly pure fiction and has little basis in fact.


I dont like the directors cut - I hate that scene where salieri insists constanze sleep with him - ruins the sublime scene where salieri is going through mozart's manuscripts - and makes no sense as salieri tells the priest he had promised god to be chaste in return for a successful musical career and bedding constanze is just petty revenge - not the sublime just revenge on god that he craves (unless he really fancies her - and she is rather tasty in that film I must say)

I think the theatrical release is just right


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## DavidA

stomanek said:


> I dont like the directors cut - I hate that scene where salieri insists constanze sleep with him - ruins the sublime scene where salieri is going through mozart's manuscripts - and makes no sense as salieri tells the priest he had promised god to be chaste in return for a successful musical career and bedding constanze is just petty revenge - not the sublime just revenge on god that he craves (unless he really fancies her - and she is rather tasty in that film I must say)
> 
> I think the theatrical release is just right


But Salieri rejects Constanze which gives more credence to her hostility towards him in the last part of the film


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## PetrB

I can not think of a more ingenious way to present a personage like Mozart than other through the device / foil of 'the lens of a Salieri." If that perfectly chosen device were missing, you would get some tedious "Here's Mozart" scenario which would pall as pseudo-documentary, or a bad (and dull) music history lecture.

Shaffer is known for the 'perfectly made play,' and he certainly made one with Amadeus, and transliterated the play into an equally fine film script. The cast is stellar, from the principals through to the least character. The direction and cinematography are great. The production values have the film a feast of eye-candy from beginning to end.

Shaffer also used Salieri as the device to communicate to the audience, well-illustrating / explaining the astonishing qualities of Mozart's music to any member of that audience who merely attended and listened.

Complete historical accuracy in most dramas would turn them into much flatter documentaries -- not the goal, thank God!

For the rest, whether it is supposedly adult journalists complaining about the lack of accuracy in Oliver Stone's film about the Kennedy assassination (_JFK_), or anyone complaining about the lack of accuracy in Milos Forman's filmed version of Amadeus with its screenplay by Shaffer -- _I don't know at what point people began to think a drama, or a movie not flat out called a "Documentary." was intended to be other than a drama or a film_, nor why some think that is where one should rely for their education


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## Triplets

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Read the play maybe a dozen times and the movie about half that. It's an amazing story! Really well crafted and I would love to see it done in a theatre. The whole background of "salieri killing mozart" as a story concept dates back to the first half of the 19th century, but Amadeus would clearly be the best remembered version (both movie and play).


I saw the play three times and own the movie. The play has more of an emphasis on Salieri and milos Forman said at the time of his making the movie that he deliberately shifted the emphasis to Mozart. They are both enjoyable but somewhat different experiences. fwiw I never thought F Murray Abraham captures the spiteful Salieri that the play depicts.


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