Amadeus (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Act 1

Amadeus opens with “savage whispers” that fill the theater. The citizens of Vienna in 1823 hiss the name “Salieri” and “assassin.” Antonio Salieri, an old man, appears in a wheelchair, with his back to the audience. Two venticelli,“purveyors of fact, rumor and gossip throughout the play,” hurry in, speaking rapidly about “the whole city... talking day and night.” Salieri cries out, “Mozart! Pardon your assassin... have mercy.” The venticelli explain that when Mozart died thirty-two years ago, there was some talk about him being poisoned by Salieri. They wonder why Salieri would do such a thing and why he would confess it now.

Salieri asks the audience to be his confessors. He admits his lifelong desire for fame, “yet only in one especial way. Music! Absolute music... music is God’s art.” He longed “to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past.” As a result, he implored God,“let me be a composer... in return, I will live with virtue... and I will honor You with much music all the days of my life.” When God responded to him,“Go forth, Antonio. Serve Me and mankind, and you will be blessed,” Salieri thanked him and promised, “I am Your servant for life.”

The very next day, a family friend suddenly appeared and took him to Vienna, where he studied music and soon became the court composer. Salieri decided, “Clearly my bargain had been accepted.” The same year the young prodigy Mozart was touring Europe. Salieri tells the audience,’ I present to you — for one performance only — my last composition, entitled The Death of Mozart, or, Did I Do It? dedicated to posterity on this, the last night of my life.” He then takes off his dressing gown and becomes a young man wearing the elegant clothes of a successful composer in the 1780s.

The scene shifts to 1781 and Emperor Joseph II and his court in Vienna. Salieri is thirty-one, “a prolific” composer to the Hapsburg court, and married to “a respectable” wife, Teresa. The venticelli, Salieri’s “Little Winds,” announce that Mozart will be giving a concert for the court. While Salieri sits in a chair eating sweets in the library at the Palace of Schoönbrunn, Constanze Weber, daughter of Mozart’s landlady, runs into the room squeaking like a mouse. Mozart follows her meowing like a cat. Mozart teases Constanze (Stanzi) with sexual innuendoes and bathroom humor and frequently emits “an unforgettable giggle — piercing and infantile.” His demeanor appalls Salieri. Later, when Mozart begins playing one of his compositions, Salieri responds with such delight that it makes him tremble. He runs out into the street, “gasping for life.” Addressing the audience, he explains, “it seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God. .. and it was the voice of an obscene child” After the conceit, Salieri buries his fear in work and prays to God, asking Him, “let Your voice enter me!” When his “Little Winds” report that audiences seem unimpressed by Mozart’s performances, Salieri begins to think that the serenade he heard was an exception, “an accident.”

Salieri composes an “extremely banal” march in Mozart’s honor. When Mozart quickly transforms it into an exceptional piece of music, Salieri admits, “was it then — so early — that I began to have thoughts of murder?” Mozart clashes with the emperor’s advisors over his choice of subject and music for his commissioned operas. He also has difficulty finding pupils. Against the wishes of his father, he and Constanze marry and the two live well beyond their means. When Constanze asks Salieri to help her husband get work, the composer sees this as an opportunity to take his revenge. He invites her to his apartment, where he plans to seduce her. After Salieri makes it clear that he will help Mozart if she grants him sexual favors, she at first resists, but soon starts to tease him. Salieri then throws her out, offended by her “commonness” and angry at his own considered descent into adultery and blackmail.

When Salieri studies the manuscripts Constanze left behind, he hears the music in his head, acknowledging that they are the same sounds he had heard at the palace, “the same crushed harmonies — glancing collisions — agonizing delights.” The piece he had heard “had been no accident.” He admits, “I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at — an Absolute Beauty.” As a result, he feels betrayed by God:

I know my fate. Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness.... You gave me the desire to serve You... then saw to it the service was shameful in the ears of the server.... You gave me the desire to praise You... then made me mute.... You put into me perception of the Incomparable... then ensured that I would know myself forever mediocre.... MOZART!... spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart... him You have chosen to be Your sole conduct.

A bitter Salieri warns God, “From this time we are enemies, You and I. I’ll not accept it from You — do you hear?... you are the Enemy. I name Thee now... and this I swear: to my last breath I shall block You on earth, as far as I am able.”

The scene shifts to the present, with the older Salieri promising to reveal to the audience the details of “the war [he] fought with God through His preferred Creature — Mozart ... in the waging of which, of course, the Creature had to be destroyed.”

Act 2

Back in the past, audiences are still not appreciating Mozart’s work. His resulting desperation is compounded when his father dies. In an effort to earn money, he writes The Magic Flute, “something for ordinary German people.” Salieri suggests he include in his composition a focus on the Masons, the fraternal order of which both are members. While he composes The Magic Flute, Constanze leaves with the children and his health deteriorates. He is continually taunted by dreams of a figure in gray, who compels him to write a requiem Mass.

When a member of the emperor’s court discovers that Mozart has exposed Masonic rituals in The Magic Flute, he is outraged. As a result, Mozart’s reputation and career are ruined. Soon after, when Mozart dies, Salieri admits to feeling a mixture of relief and pity. In the present, Salieri explains,

Slowly I understood the nature of God’s punishment.... This was my sentence: I must endure thirty years of being called “distinguished” by people incapable of distinguishing... and finally... when my nose had been rubbed in fame to vomiting — it would be taken away from me.... Mozart’s music sounded louder and louder through the world. And mine faded completely, till no one played it at all.

Salieri admits he has attempted to convince the world that he poisoned Mozart, so that he will be remembered, “if not in fame, then infamy,” and so win his battle with God. He then cuts his throat. The venticelli tell the audience that Salieri’s efforts failed: he survived his attempted suicide and the public refused to believe he had murdered Mozart. The play ends with Salieri, in a gesture of benediction, telling the audience, “mediocrities everywhere — now and to come — I absolve you all. Amen.” He then folds his arms “high across his own breast in a gesture of self-sanctification.”