Amadeus (Criticism)

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is an associate professor of English at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on British and American authors. In the following essay, she examines how Shaffer’s play explores the complex relationship between fathers and sons.

Shaffer’s Amadeus gained appreciative audiences due to its compelling depiction of the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporary, Antonio Salieri. In this fictionalized version of the two composers’ relationship, Shaffer explores the mystery of creative inspiration, the search for spirituality, and the consequences of success and failure. Shaffer intertwines these themes in the play with its most absorbing one — an exploration of the problematic relations that can develop between fathers and sons.

The first father/son relationship Shaffer introduces to the audience is the one between Salieri and God. Finding his relationship with his biological father lacking, Salieri began a spiritual quest that would result in his determination to glorify God through music. He exhibits an obvious lack of respect for his father who did not share his passion for music or his quest for fame. Salieri admits that his parents’ goals were to call on God for assurance of their economic security and to “keep them forever preserved in mediocrity.” Their son’s requirements, however, were very different. From an early age, he wanted to gain fame as a composer and so strikes a bargain with his spiritual father, whom he feels has the power to grant him his wish. Longing “to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past,” he begs 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.

Salieri seems assured of the blessings and support of his spiritual father when at thirty-one, he becomes a prolific composer to the Hapsburg court of Emperor Joseph II. Soon, however, when he hears the “voice of God” in Mozart’s exquisite and superior compositions, he feels betrayed and questions why God has rejected him and has chosen instead to glorify “an obscene child.” The first time he hears Mozart, Salieri confesses, “tonight at an inn somewhere in this city stands a giggling child who can put on paper, without actually setting down his billiard cue, casual notes which turn my most considered ones into lifeless scratches.” Noting his affinity with Adam, God’s first child, Salieri expresses a sense of emptiness resulting from feelings of abandonment.

Engaging in a bout of intense sibling rivalry with God’s new favorite composer, Salieri complains:

You have chosen [Mozart] to be Your sole conduct. And my only reward — my sublime privilege — is to be the sole man alive in this time who shall clearly recognize Your Incarnation.... Everyday I sat to work I prayed... make this one good in my ears. Just this one... but would He, ever? I heard my music calmed in convention, not one breath of spirit to lift it off the shallows. And I heard his — month after month... the spirit singing through it, unstoppable, to my ears alone.

Salieri vows to destroy God’s creature in an effort to take revenge on his spiritual parent. In an ironic reversal, he rebels against his father figure and usurps his role. He threatens God, “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.... What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons.” He now declares his intention to destroy Mozart so he can block God “in one of His purest manifestations,” which excites him. Salieri insists,“I had the power. God needed me to get him worldly advancement. So it would be a battle to the end — and Mozart was the battleground.” He admits that his quarrel was not with Mozart; it was through him to God, “who loved him so.”

Salieri, as the rebellious and rejected son, decides to renounce his devotion to duty and responsibility. When he has sexual relations with Katherina Cavalieri and subsequently takes her as his mistress, he notes, “so much for my vow of sexual virtue.”

When he resigns from his committees that offer aid to impoverished musicians, he admits, “so much for my vow of social virtue.”

Shaffer creates another compelling father/son relationship in the play in his depiction of the interaction between Mozart and his father, Leopold. Salieri describes Leopold as “a bad-tempered Salzburg musician who dragged the boy endlessly round Europe, making him play the keyboard blindfolded, with one finger.” The audience never meets Leopold, but he makes his presence felt through his son, who is afraid of him. Mozart claims his father is a bitter man who is jealous of his success. Leopold continually tries to control Mozart’s actions, but for the most part, fails. Mozart marries Stanzi against his father’s wishes and stays in Vienna, living well above his means.

Psychologically, though, Leopold has a great influence over his son. Werner Huber and Hubert Zapf in their article “On the Structure of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus,” in Modern Drama, conclude that in the play Mozart has the “capacity for the elemental, passionate, natural life which Salieri lacks.” Yet, they continue, his personality is “in a constant struggle with an equally powerful superego, the figure of his authoritarian father. As soon as he is mentioned, the sense of fun deserts Mozart.”

When Leopold dies, Mozart falls apart, exclaiming, “how will I go now? In the world. There’s no one else. No one who understands the wickedness around. I can’t see it.... He watched for me all my life — and I betrayed him.” Leopold reappears as the solemn ghost in Don Giovanni, as a projection of Mozart’s feelings of guilt. Later, in a reflection of his desire to regain his father’s love and direction, Mozart reincarnates him in The Magic Flute, where he appears as a high priest, “his hand extended to the world in love.”

Salieri plays on Mozart’s desperate need for the approval of a father figure and so appears to adopt this role. Huber and Zapf conclude that

Salieri not only seems to see all, hear all, know all about Mozart’s private life, and systematically [tries] to destroy his material existence; [he] actually reduces Mozart to the mental state of a child at the end, appearing in the mask of the nightmarish father-figure of Mozart’s dreams, who takes his revenge on the rebellious son.

When Salieri reveals his true identity to Mozart at the end of the play, he reduces Mozart to a whimpering child. In response, Salieri characterizes their spiritual father as one who has abandoned both of them. He concludes, “We are both poisoned, Amadeus. I with you: you with me.... Ten years of my hate have poisoned you to death.” When Mozart falls to his knees and cries out to God, Salieri responds,

God?... God does not help.... He can only use.... He cares nothing for whom He uses; nothing for whom He denies.... You are no use to Him anymore. You’re too weak — too sick. He has finished with you. All you can do now is die.... Die, Amadeus.” And so Amadeus dies, without a father’s love and support.

At the end of Amadeus, a broken Salieri again assumes the role of his spiritual father, whom he feels has rejected him. He implores the audience to pray to him as the Patron Saint of Mediocrities for forgiveness when they feel “the dreadful bite” of their failures, “and hear the taunting of unachievable, uncaring God.” As Salieri concludes his final gesture of benediction with the declaration, “mediocrities everywhere — now and to come — I absolve you all,” he makes the final statement of Shaffer’s absorbing view of the psychological intricacy of the father/son relationship.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Amadeus, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Carole Hamilton

Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay, she examines the conflict between genius and mediocrity and their relationship to the observing and judging audience in Shaffer’splay.

Shaffer spent five years writing Amadeus, and of that, “a whole year attempting a different opening scene every week.” As anyone knows who has written and rewritten a work, trying to get it right, the writer’s internal “judge” watching and criticizing, often prevents the natural flow of ideas. One imagines a future audience, at one moment approving, the next moment condemning. Anticipation of criticism can stifle the creative process or lead an author to try to perfect the work to ward off an unpleasant rejection. Shaffer’s play puts this tension in the creative process at center stage. His rival characters, Salieri and Mozart, are rivals of talent — one a genius and one a “mediocrity,” whose products are judged by mediocre audiences. Shaffer foregrounds the role of the audience in this transaction by the opening scene (of the play version) and the closing lines to “mediocrities everywhere.” This interaction with the audience, which Shaffer labored a full year to produce, suggests that the heart of Amadeus has to do with the observer’s appraisal of genius.

In the beginning of Amadeus, just after the “prelude” of Venticelli (“Little Winds”) spreading gossip, a dying Salieri startles the audience by shining the house lights on them as he calls them forth as “Ghosts of the Future.” He then invites the audience to sit back and observe his confession, framed as a detective mystery, “The Death of Mozart; or, Did I Do It?” As Salieri transforms into his youthful self, his older self also watches and guides the audience’s interpretation through his comments upon his own history in the making. The older Salieri observes the younger, who, in his turn, obsessively observes his rival Mozart, while the audience looks on. Sometimes the theme of observing is especially in the foreground, as when Salieri sits unobserved in his armchair, eavesdropping on Mozart and Constanze as they play childish games in Baroness Waldstadten’s library. Here, as elsewhere, Salieri judges Mozart as socially inferior and artistically brilliant, and it is through his consciousness that the audience sees and judges Mozart and Salieri as well.

Pairing Salieri with Mozart constitutes, by Shaffer’s own admission, the classical Apollonian/ Dionysian contest, a tension that has fascinated him for years. He said early in his career, “There is in me a continuous tension between what I suppose I could call the Apollonian and the Dionysiac sides of interpreting life.” These contrasting sensibilities find expression in several Shaffer pairings — Dysart and Alan Strang; Atahuallpa and Pizzaro; Salieri and Mozart — who inevitably contend with each other. In this last pair, Salieri composes repetitive, safe, baroque music and envies Mozart for his ease in producing imaginative counterpoints and bold new harmonies. Salieri cannot leave Mozart alone because his very existence denies his own achievements and his theology. Shaffer has constructed the match with great care, setting them up as polar

opposites in many respects. Salieri, upholding the edifice of the court composer, stands for artifice, Mozart for art. Salieri labors to produce banal stories set to mediocre scores; Mozart effortlessly transforms primitive emotion into absolute beauty. As Werner Huber and Hubert Zapf describe,“Salieri and Mozart come to personify two different modes... Italian versus German, the heroic (mythological matter) versus the everyday, tragedy versus comedy, grand opera versus Singspiel.”

Even after the play’s successful opening in London, Shaffer revised the script numerous times, trying to get it right. He says in the preface to the play script, “I have never before altered material in a play so extensively. I was led on to do this by what became a nearly obsessive pursuit of clarity, structural order, and drama.” Shaffer sought to craft a classic “well-made play,” one of logical construction, a tightly designed and balanced plot that leads inevitably to a pivotal disclosure scene. Of course, by the 1970s, the era of Hair, the well-made play was quite out of style. But Shaffer had never concerned himself with being stylish, having said in 1963,“As the man said, there are many tunes yet to be written in C major. And there are many plays yet to be written in a living room. Keeping up with fashion is a terrible race.” Instead of the self-reflexive style of the new theater, Shaffer employs the conventional plot structure of the well-made play, taking pains to strike a neat balance between his protagonists and fashioning a significant angle from which to view their squaring-off, all to be played out in the most dramatic format possible. The angle he chooses in Amadeus is the view through the malice-filled eyes of Salieri.

Salieri narrates as an observing interpreter who judges Mozart and himself and blames God for the painful difference he sees. He presides over his own hearing, with himself and God on the stand. Salieri’s garrulousness, or rambling talk, is striking. Only the emotional intensity of his monologues makes his many long harangues tolerable. He talks too much, from the standpoint of verbosity as well as that of revealing his own malicious nature. Salieri plays both patient and analyst, criminal and policeman, as he unfolds the mystery of whether he indeed murdered Mozart, which he claims to have done in revenge against God. But Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh points out that Salieri also hates Mozart for traits he has himself,“unconsciously [he] views Mozart as a projection of repressed impulses within himself, impulses he cannot and will not acknowledge.” Mozart represents the artist’s self-indulgence, the desire to lose oneself in art. Salieri fears letting his own passion gain control, so he placates it with an indulgence in sweets and then hates Mozart for succeeding where he fails. He fantasizes that Mozart writes effortlessly, recording whole works straight from his head to the page, without correction. As he tells God, “somewhere in this city stands a giggling child who can put on paper, without actually setting down his billiard cue, casual notes which turn my most considered ones into lifeless scratches.”

Suffering from feelings of his own inferiority, Salieri maliciously projects his self-hatred toward Mozart and takes advantage of the younger composer’s faults to destroy him. For, in spite of his tremendous genius, Mozart — the “‘Natural Man,’ passionate and elemental,” as Christopher Innes has described him — lacks the simplest skills of civilized life. Mozart, like other geniuses who focus on art rather than on getting through life, is burdened with impracticality; his childlike innocence leads to errors of judgment. The genius is all too vulnerable to hatred and intrigue, to the treacherous devices of the urbane Salieri. However, Salieri’s hatred of Mozart is so extreme and his own culpability so obvious that the viewer does not join with him in resenting Mozart’s insufficiencies, but instead condemns Salieri for capitalizing on those failings to destroy an innocent. The culpable narrator turns his victim into a Christ-like figure and himself into Judas. Nevertheless, Salieri seems to revel in the condemning judgment he has called up from the audience, which he displaces onto God and not himself.

Salieri justifies blaming God because of a “bargain” he had struck as a youngster to lead a life of virtue in return for fame as a musician. By constantly alluding to this bargain, Salieri draws a measure of empathy when he rages like Lear against God. But even in these moments, his accusations sound trumped up, misguided. The dramatic irony of Salieri’s position is that he vainly attempts to attack a God who never accepted Salieri’s initial bargain in the first place. Salieri blames God unjustly. In the process of fighting back at God, Salieri causes irreparable damage to a defenseless innocent who has never questioned God’s intention and who has assumed God’s support of his genius all along. Mozart cannot believe he might die before finishing the Requiem, for, as he exclaims,“God can’t want it unfinished.” Mozart is sacrificed on the altar of Salieri’s inferiority. Peter Hall, who directed the first staging of Amadeus, notes in his production diary that God “is shown as selfish and uncaring, following his own needs, indifferent to the suffering of man.” God thus fails on the cosmic level, for not being there to observe, to judge, or to intervene. It is therefore left to the audience to judge Salieri. In this respect, Shaffer turns the audience into God.

Shaffer has Mozart expressly state that the audience should be God: “That’s our job, we composers: to combine the inner minds of him and him and her, and her and her — the thoughts of chambermaids and court composers — and turn the audience into God.” In this guise, according to the analysis of Werner Huber and Hubert Zapf, the audience plays the part of a “chorus of humanity” with Salieri as the central, guiding voice. The primary role of a Greek-like chorus is to observe and judge, and even though the narrative perspective of Salieri evokes some empathy, he evokes judgment as well. Thus Salieri summons the “Ghosts of the Future,” who have “yet to hate” and “yet to kill,” to observe and judge him. He seems irrationally to hope, by referring to the audience as the “yet to hate” and the “yet to kill,” that they will understand his plight and forgive him. He wants to make himself into a Christ of the mediocre people, who dies for the sins of the mediocre people to come. He wants them to join him in blaming God for condemning him to mediocrity and causing him to kill.

But, as many critics have noted, it is not Salieri’s struggle with God that lies at the center of the play. More than one critic has noted, with Stanley Kauffmann, that this struggle is “flimsy, fabricated, facetious.” Can it be that a playwright who has labored for years to construct a tightly knit plot would produce one with such a soft central core? John Simon of the National Review mused that the theme lay instead in Shaffer’s own psyche, as a “lamentation of his own mediocrity.” Certainly, in verbosity, Salieri mirrors the authorial character that emerges from Shaffer’s effusive prefaces and numerous self-reflective articles. But does he have Salieri-like fears? And does his fear find an empathetic response in the audience? As Stanley Kauffmann notes in his review for Saturday Review, when

Salieri totters forward to address us: ‘Mediocrities everywhere — now and to come — I absolve you all! Amen!’ [it] Sounds grand until one thinks about it. What power of absolution does he have, and what is he absolving them of? His legacy of jealousy, of a sense of God’s injustice? Of a wish to be more than they are? The best guess may be that, at the last, Salieri is addressing his author.

This is decidedly not a play about the author’s own feelings of inadequacy. The key lies in the nature of the audience that Salieri invoked at the beginning of the play. After the prelude of Venticelli, Salieri calls up the “Ghosts of the Future,” who are identified by the house lights shining on them. They are the future, in relation to Salieri, who is being portrayed in the eighteenth century. The important issue here is that it is not the literal audience sitting in those seats, bathed in the house lights, to whom he refers, but a characterized narrative audience — the “audience” to whom Salieri speaks is just another role in the play. As such, his “naratee” — the characters Salieri addresses as the “mediocrities everywhere” and the “yet to hate” — constitutes a fictional construction, not the actual audience. This distinction is important because it allows the audience to be “smarter” than the characterized narrative audience — smart enough to realize that Salieri’s anger at God is misplaced and that his theme of observer and judge is an analogy. It is a metaphor for the way the judging and fearful inner observer inside the mind of everyman consistently destroys genius.

Shaffer loves his craft, and he is very good at it. Although it is not impossible that the themes of mediocrity versus genius and judgment by inferiors in Amadeus touch upon his own experience, this does not imply Shaffer’s own mediocrity or his fear of it. On the contrary, his ability to evoke these ideas consummately attests to his ability to create the world he meant to create.

Source: Carole Hamilton, Critical Essay on Amadeus, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

What Do I Read Next?

• Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Norton Introduction to Music History, by Philip G. Downs (1992), presents a useful study of Mozart and his contemporaries.
• Shaffer’s play Equus, produced in 1973, presents another exploration of two men of widely differing personalities linked by a common spiritual bond.
• In Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception (1999), David P. Schroeder examines the letters Mozart and his father wrote to each other. He discovers important information about the personality of each man as well as their relationship to each other.
• 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, written by H. C. Robbins Landon and M. C. Landon (1999), explores the controversial last year of Mozart’s life and the rumors of Salieri’s involvement in his death.
• Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Nausea (1938) deals with existential themes as Amadeus does. In Sartre’s play, the main characters must cope with a God-abandoned universe and turn to art in an effort to alleviate their sense of meaninglessness.