Amadeus (Style)

Style

Narration

The play is structured like a deathbed confession, similar to Monticello’s in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” The play opens after the main events have occurred and with one of the main characters, Antonio Salieri, speaking to the audience as an old man. Salieri frequently addresses the audience directly, sometimes in an aside, during the course of the play to gain support and understanding. This self-conscious, expression-istic device not only provides the audience with useful information; it also allows them a glimpse of Salieri’s inner thoughts and emotions. When Salieri speaks to the audience, the other characters often “freeze” and the soundtrack stops. The venticelli, or the “Little Winds,” sometimes speak directly to the audience as they relate important information about the events surrounding Salieri’s relationship with Mozart. The venticelli also provide Salieri with useful information about Mozart’s activities and the public’s response to both composers.

Salieri’s narration frames the play, which opens and closes with a focus on Salieri as a bitter old man, lamenting the loss of his fame and the overwhelming appreciation of Mozart’s work. The older Salieri also appears at the middle of the play to offer a commentary on the main plot details surrounding his relationship with Mozart.

Point of View

Shaffer tells the story of the relationship between Mozart and Salieri from Salieri’s subjective point of view. While other characters in the play often substantiate Salieri’s opinion of Mozart’s character, especially when he challenges the composer’s petulance and immaturity, they do not validate his portrayal of God’s motives and behavior. Salieri’s God is “an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe, staring at the world with dealer’s eyes” — a vision he takes from a painting he saw as a child. Salieri cannot admit to any responsibility for his artistic shortcomings and so must blame God for them. He insists that when he was young, God promised to grant him the gift of music. When He does not live up to this promise, He becomes Salieri’s “cunning Enemy,” whom Salieri continually tries to block. Salieri’s God proves unjust to him after, he claims, God gave Salieri the desire to serve Him through music, but then “saw to it the service was shameful in the ears of the server” and gave him the ability to recognize greatness while acknowledging his own mediocrity.

Salieri’s God is also pitiless, insisting that He (God) does not need Salieri because He has Mozart. When Salieri decides God has also turned his back on Mozart, Salieri tells the artist that God will not help or love him, for “God does not love. He can only use.... He cares nothing for whom He uses; nothing for whom He denies.”

Symbol

The title of the play, Amadeus, translates into “God’s love” and thus becomes ironically symbolic in the play. Salieri continually tries to gain recognition of God’s love for him, especially since his “one desire was to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past.” However, he sees an expression of God’s love only in Mozart’s music, which baffles him and drives him to the verge of madness. When he hears one of Mozart’s compositions, Salieri confesses, “it seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God — and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard — and it was the voice of an obscene child!”

Shaffer also uses music symbolically in the play. His inclusion of Mozart’s most lyrical and stirring passages illustrates “God’s voice” in the music, especially when juxtaposed with Salieri’s more pedestrian pieces. Shaffer also uses the music to allow the audience to glimpse Salieri’s inner turmoil. For example, when Salieri reads the manuscripts Constanze brings him, he hears Mozart’s swelling music and “staggers” forward “like a man caught in a tumbling and violent sea.” When the drums “crash,” Salieri echoes the emotion of the piece as he drops the manuscripts and “falls senseless to the ground.” Shaffer directs, “At the same second the music explodes into a long, echoing, distorted boom, signifying some dreadful annihilation.” At this climactic point, Salieri’s dream of becoming God’s chosen has been shattered.