PeterRS Posted 6 hours ago Posted 6 hours ago Yet another anniversary. This time the 40th since what was to become the winner of the Best Oscar was first shown, director Milos Forman's adaptation of the Peter Shaffer play Amadeus. On the face of it, the movie is about the rivalry that existed between the conventional and somewhat boring Viennese Court Composer Antonio Salieri and a young composer brought from the Court at Salzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the movie, that rivalry leads to near hatred with Salieri responsible for Mozart's early death at the age of 36. Salieri then goes mad. Like several other issues in the play and the film, that is dramatic licence for there is no evidence that Mozart's death was caused in any way by Salieri. That the two thoroughly disliked each other initially is fact. That Salieri was intensely jealous of Mozart's extraodinary talent compared to his own much more modest accomplishments is mostly fact. That Salieri blamed God for giving such gifts to such a silly and uncouth boy is another truth. Mozart may not have been quite as childish as shown in the movie, but he was no young saint. He enjoyed visiting the taverns in town, he wrote scatalogical references in many of his letters and even penned a series of musical pornographic canons (a canon being a musical device). One starts with the line "Lick me in the arse, quickly, quickly!", basically an 18th century verson of "Lick My Ass". Not shown in the movie is that Salieri on the other hand was equally no saint as attested by his wife, eight children and mistress. And the rivalry can not have been that serious given that Mozart entrusted the musical education of his son to Salieri. In today's BBC website, there is a long article about the movie and especially about Milos Forman's return to communist Czechoslovakia to film most of the movie in Prague, the city where Mozart spent several years and where several of his major works received their premiere. It even suggests that certain elements in the film reflect communist society before glasnost started to tear the Soviet Union apart. The writer even suggests - Forman's aim for Amadeus can be seen as radically different from a typical biopic, and that was to use a fictionalised version of an epic clash between musical composers to allegorise the defining global rivalry of the mid-to-late 20th Century: the Cold War. Put simply, the film may have played fast and loose with 1784 because its real preoccupation was 1984 . . . The Soviet allegory can certainly be applied to Amadeus. Perhaps Forman was less concerned with hewing to biographical facts as he was with presenting Mozart as a beleaguered type of ecstatic genius who, hostage to patronage, is stifled and finally crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state. Joseph II, absolute ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, is advised at court by a clutch of prudish sycophants who undermine Mozart's achievements and smear his reputation. Whatever its loose correspondence to the late-18th and early-19th Centuries, this critique can be read as a stab at the USSR – a debilitatingly centralised bureaucracy hostile to insurgent ideas and innovation. What is true is that after Forman saw the play, he persuaded Peter Shaffer to reimagine it in a slightly different way for his film. They spent four months cloistered in a farmhouse in Connecticut where they basically rebuilt the narrative with a "fresh palette of political references." Many major actors lobbied hard for the main parts. Kenneth Branagh almost landed the part of Mozart until Foreman decided on a largely US cast (with the honourable exceptions of the superb English actor Roy Dotrice as Mozart's father and Simon Callow as the theatre owner Emanuel Shikaneder). Mark Hamill undertook several auditions for the part of Mozart. For Salieri Al Pacino, Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland and Burt Reynolds all lobbied for the part. Both were given to relative unknowns in the movie world. It is, I think, also interesting that today when much classical music around the world is suffering from major financial constraints, the music in the movie was selected by the conductor Neville Marriner and performed by him and his Academy of St. Martin's in the Fields orchestra (St. Martin's referring to the name of the Church in London's Trafalgar Square where they are based). At a time when most movie music was performed for fees, Marriner elected instead to be put on a royalty. The film's huge success resulted in a bonanza for the orchestra which enabled it to build its own completely new rehearsal studios. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240926-could-amadeus-be-the-most-misunderstood-oscar-winner-ever Quote
