Film as Musicology: Amadeus

Robert L. Marshall

Friends, film buffs, fellow musicologists: I have come to praise Amadeus,

not to bury it! But before I get to that let me say that I felt privileged
when I was asked to take part, during the 1996 annual meeting of the
American Musicological Society, in the first-ever panel devoted to estab-
lishing a new discipline within our discipline, namely Film as Musicology
(ossia: Musicology as Film Criticism). It was certainly about time for such
a panel, considering how many times I have been asked—and I am sure
just about all of us have been asked: "Was Mozart really like that?" or
"Were there really such creatures as castrati—and were they really like
That?" In short: Hollywood has discovered the romance of music history
and has become infatuated with it (if not necessarily with us). But before
true love can take hold with this new object of desire, Tinseltown evi-
dently is convinced that cosmetic surgery is necessary—minor or major
(no pun intended) as the case may be. But since, for the love object, the
more radical the surgery, the greater the risk of disfigurement, perhaps
fatally so, it would seem to fall to us, if to anyone, to be on guard—pre-
pared to do battle, if necessary, but not to assume that we are destined to
be up against an inevitably hostile antagonist.

In short, before any of us are tempted to seek the thrilling rush of the
sense of intellectual and moral superiority by bashing Hollywood for falsi-
fying the facts of music history, and in the process perhaps risking no little
embarrassment, we had better pause for a moment and consider: what
would we think of, say, any historians of ancient history who would rake
Shakespeare, or Handel, over the coals for what they had done to the his-
torical Julius Caesar? If their beef were solely with the undisputed circum-
stance that hard facts had been disregarded, rearranged, deliberately dis-
torted, or even completely made up, an indignation propelled furthermore
by a reluctance to acknowledge the manifestly different purposes of histo-
riography and of dramaturgy, and by an unwillingness to acknowledge that
creative artists, after all, carry poetic licenses—that is, licenses to kill fac-
tual truth when it stands in the way of poetic or dramatic truth—well, I
think we might be inclined to dismiss such criticism, be it ever so earnest,
as smug, narrow-minded, and (the most dreaded of pejoratives hurled our
way) pedantic quibbles—to dismiss it, to put it mildly, as altogether miss-

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 174 The Musical Quarterly

ing the point—the artistic point that authorizes that poetic license to kill,
or at least maim, the literal truth.
The aesthetic, and indeed the moral, point, from our perspective,
when considering the genre (or, if one prefers, the ilk) of the music-
historical film obviously has to be the same as that informing our attitude
toward its counterpart and antecedent: the venerable—if always suspect—
historical novel. And it is the same attitude, really, that has to steer our
judgment of Shakespeare or Handel or any lesser mortal who chooses to
"do a number" on Julius Caesar—or on the kings of the House of Lancaster
or York. Namely: if, armed with the shield of their poetic licenses, they are
going to trash the facts of history and, along the way perhaps, cast a baleful
light on the reputations of great and famous men, then they had better be
prepared to redeem the historiographical insult with a sufficient portion of
poetic truth, justice, or some other compelling form of adequate compen-
sation.
I will readily concede that Hollywood is not Handel. And while, by
the same token, Peter Shaffer, the author of the play, and the film script,
of Amadens, may not be Shakespeare, I think we may all agree that he is
not chopped liver either—that is, he is certainly not a mere opportunistic
purveyor of tabloid titillation but clearly a thoughtful dramatist who
demands to be taken seriously.

Now, I was at something of a disadvantage at the AMS Film as Musicol-

ogy panel for one obvious reason: unlike the other works under review,
Amadeus, and the controversy and hand-wringing it precipitated, were, by
1996, overly familiar and, really, very stale. The play had been around for
more than fifteen years. It opened in London in 1979 and in New York a
year later, was published in book form in 1981, and appeared as a movie
directed by Milos Forman in 1984. The film world's collective verdict on
the movie reverberates in the fact that it won eight Academy Awards in
1984, including Best Picture.
Our colleagues have often had more trouble with it, owing, of course,
to all those pesky historical "mistakes" or, if one prefers, "liberties." In
response to the challenge the film presented in that respect, the October
1984 issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life published a set of three
short essays under the rubric "Film Forum: Amadeus," consisting of
"Amadeus and Authenticity," by Jane Perry-Camp (Florida State Univer-
sity), "Amadeus: From Play to Film," by Mark Ringer (UCLA), and
"Amadeus and the World of Milos Forman," by J. L. L. Johnson (College
of Charleston).1 Perry-Camp's "Amadeus and Authenticity," published, as
I say, in 1984, was able to report on the "lists upon lists" of factual errors
that had already been drawn by then, recited many of those errors, and

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 Film as Musicology: Amadeus 175

added quite a few more, suggesting that "Amadeus' historical mistakes and
semi-mistakes are legion."2 The interested reader can consult the lists in
her article.3 Though Perry-Camp is largely negative in her evaluation of
the film and even worried about its ultimate cultural impact—concerned
that Mozart here "is once again the victim of commercial interests"4—she
does make an important concession (or confession) when she remarks
that "there is one overwhelming salvaging force in Amadeus: Mozart's
music."5

As with Salieri, Amadeus indeed may make confessors of us all. So let me

now confess that I thoroughly admire almost everything about both the
play and the quite different film. I find the play, with its emphasis on what
Mark Ringer described as the "theomachia between Salieri and the Big
Guy Upstairs,"6 brilliant theater, dramatically effective, and presenting
two of the more memorable dramatic characters of recent decades. As for
the film, as Shaffer once explained in an interview, the main protagonist
there was no longer Salieri; it was, rather, Mozart's music J One of his cen-
tral objectives in fact was to saturate the film with it.
Now, in either version, Amadeus is of course a work of the imagina-
tion, and the author has felt free to shift the chronology, to fuse the facts
into new configurations, and to augment them for dramatic effect. And I
find nothing wrong with this, simply because, in this instance, it works so
well. And I do think it is carping and pedantic to accuse Shaffer of dis-
torting the facts; it would surely be absurd to accuse him of not knowing
them. Shaffer clearly knows the facts and exactly what he is doing with
them. As a theatergoer, I could only say "hats off'; in fact, as someone
who has dipped into Mozart's biography, I applaud Shaffer's extensive
familiarity with the events of Mozart's life and, even more, his eloquent
and perceptive homage to Mozart's music.
As to the music: have we not all been impressed by Salieri's impas-
sioned and vivid description of the slow movement of the Serenade for
Thirteen Wind Instruments, K. 361 (with its memorable squeezebox
image)? As to the composer—specifically, Shaffer's perpetuating the myth
of Mozart's effortless composition in that famous scene where Constanze
shows him her husband's manuscripts and Salieri swoons while contem-
plating their impeccable notation—probably my favorite scene in the
movie—well, let us not overreact in our glee at having unearthed in
recent years numerous sketches and drafts in Mozart's hand and proceed
all too hastily to debunk the myth of effortless composition all too cate-
gorically. The fact remains that Mozart's manuscripts are all too often all
too clean for comfort. I remember studying in amazement bordering on
disbelief, and a sense of the eerie, the autograph of the Piano Concerto in

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 176 The Musical Quarterly

E-flat, K. 482, and realizing that, with respect to the compositional

process, it contained nothing of interest. Indeed, there were almost no
corrections of any kind, not even minor ones.
I love that scene because it forces us all to confront the unsettling
conundrum of artistic creativity of the highest imaginable order. Indeed,
Amadeus, it seems to me, is as much as anything else a symptom of our need
to account for the achievements of the great—to explain and comprehend
what made these, our fellow creatures, so extraordinary. Perhaps this need is
even greater now than ever before, since in a secular age our great figures
have in a real sense become our gods. And when there are gods and myster-
ies, that is, major unanswered questions, there will be myths. It is a symp-
tom of the vitality of our worship of the great that the mythology concern-
ing them is not a static, closed one, an "ancient" mythology, but is quite
alive and, accordingly, constantly changing. Shaffer's Mozart is almost the
alter ego, the Jungian "shadow," of the Mozart familiar to the romantic
period.
The "new mythology"—the new gospel according to Peter Shaffer
(and others)—is a reflection not of romantic idealization, which saw the
artist as a flawless and perhaps as a tragic hero, but rather of the age of
psychoanalysis and iconoclasm. We now see the blemishes on the portrait
with microscopic clarity. Mozart the man was by no means a porcelain
angel. According to the new mythology, he was not necessarily particu-
larly admirable at all. Ironically, the Mozart of romantic myth lives on
nonetheless, not only in Amadeus but in our most sophisticated biographi-
cal studies. We still prefer to cast Mozart in the story of his life as a largely
innocent victim, be it of the Archbishop of Salzburg, of his rival Salieri,
or of his father Leopold.

It is not necessary to be a drama or film critic to realize that Shaffer's play,

and the movie, too, are about Salieri, and that in them Mozart is Salieri's
obsession. Consequently, unlike Immortal Beloved, Impromptu, or Farinelli
(and apart from all questions of aesthetic taste or historical truth), Amadeus
belongs only to a limited extent to the traditional, sentimental genre of the
Hollywood musician's biography. It is a fable—a fable about God's capri-
cious apportionment of talent among his creatures: specifically, his incom-
prehensible favoring of the most decidedly undeserving. In Shaffer's fable
we do not see the historical Mozart objectively, nor even through the
author's eyes, but only through the eyes of Salieri—as Shaffer imagines
Salieri to be for his own dramatic purposes. And according to Shaffer's
bitter, envious, and resentful Salieri, Mozart was an infantile brat with an
obnoxious laugh who did not know how to behave or dress and who
seemed to find infinite pleasure in uttering scatological words.

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 Film as Musicology: Amadeus 177

This depiction dismayed, confused, and fascinated audiences—and

captured their imagination. People understandably, and quite properly,
were skeptical and wanted to know if there was any truth to this portrayal.
It was hard for the general public to imagine that Mozart used such foul
language—the language (as we enlightened ones have always known)
that erupts in the Basle letters written by Mozart to his cousin Maria
Anna Thekla, the daughter of Leopold Mozart's brother. Not that we have
felt very comfortable with those letters and the side of Mozart's personal-
ity that they reveal. What is one to make of them? How has our profes-
sion come to terms with them? Let me count the ways (or at least some of
them) as the player in Hamlet might have described them (if his preco-
cious interest in genres had been directed to modern intellectual fashions
rather than Elizabethan dramatic forms): the characterological, the psy-
choanalytical, the sociological, the cultural-linguistical, the clinical-
pathological.
For what it may be worth, I find the sociological (or perhaps it is the
cultural-linguistical) explanation the most satisfying. In the eighteenth
century, among the middle class, body parts and functions were called by
their vernacular names, not their Latin euphemisms. It would seem that
talking about the excretory functions at the time (at least in the German-
speaking world) was something of an obsession—a bit like talking about
one's diet today, perhaps, or about one's analysis.
As to that infuriating laugh: for Mozartians (scholars and lay admir-
ers alike), it is, if anything, even more repellent than the foul mouth of
Shaffer's/Salieri's Mozart. To begin with, in contrast to the scatological
language, there is absolutely no historical evidence for this idiosyncrasy.
We simply have no contemporary testimony at all as to how Mozart
sounded when he laughed. But while it lacks any documentary substantia-
tion, one can find a plausible dramatic rationale for this persistent, grat-
ingly irritating attribute attached to the play's antihero (not inappropri-
ately for a musician, a sounding attribute—a leitmotiv). A moment's
reflection reveals that it must be meant to represent—it must be meant to
be—the mocking laughter of the gods: laughter directed toward all us
common mortals who have been spitefully, maliciously denied the fire of
creative genius. Indeed, Salieri himself informs his confessor (and us)—
upon recalling the incident at the carnival, when Mozart, after having
delighted everyone present with his grotesquely comic imitation of the
sourpuss court composer at the keyboard (concluding the wooden compo-
sition with a resounding perfect authentic fart), bursts yet again into hys-
terical laughter—that "That was not Mozart laughing at me, Father. That
was God. That was God laughing at me through that obscene giggle. Go
on, Signore, laugh, laugh."

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 178 The Musical Quarterly

For the purposes of this panel, at all events, the "correct" understanding of
Mozart's foul language or how he laughed is of no import. What is impor-
tant—at least what is important for us, as members of our profession, to
recognize and acknowledge—is that the film stimulated widespread and
intense general interest in two Mozart phenomena: the man and his
music. Almost at once Mozart became the most popular, most well-
known, most purchased and, I do believe, the most truly enjoyed of the
classical composers, readily displacing Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and any-
one else who, before 1980, might have disputed his claim to that position.
Furthermore—and now comes the really good part—since people
were baffled and could not get enough of the movie, or Mozart, or his
music, they turned to the members of this profession for answers and guid-
ance. In 1984 or 1985 (that is, just a year or two after the movie had
opened), I remember giving a talk about it and its relation to "the facts."
Afterwards a young woman came to me and made a confession of her
own, namely, that she had by then already seen the film some thirty-five
or forty times and that it was consuming her. Indeed, she indicated that it
had given her life new meaning. Although she had absolutely no musical
background, she now knew that she wanted—needed—to find out as
much about Mozart as she possibly could. As she put it—quite spookily, I
have to say—she wanted to devote her life to him. I am sure you have
guessed what she was driving at: yes, she wanted to know whether she
should become a musicologist. (I very much hope she has gotten over it in
the meantime.) More significantly, by far: in the wake of Amadeus, enroll-
ments in college music courses nationwide, especially courses about WAM
himself, saw unprecedented increases.
By 1991 the Mozart mania had, if anything, increased even more. At
a conference inspired by the major Mozart event of that year, the bicen-
tennial, I remember participating in a panel discussion where someone
from the audience asked why Mozart was receiving all this attention,
especially from the popular media. One of the panelists conceded that he
really could not say: it was something of a puzzle. I piped up and submit-
ted: "It's that movie, of course—still."

That movie, then, had become our most potent ally. I would submit that
it became the most potent ally of everyone engaged in the enterprise of
cultivating and promulgating classical music—performers, scholars, and
teachers. So: two thumbs up here for Amadeus!

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 Film as Musicology: Amadeus 179

Notes
1. "Film Forum: Amadeus," Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (Oct. 1984): 116-22.
2. Jane Perry-Camp, "Amadeus and Authenticity," Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (Oct. 1984):
117.
3. Some examples of the historical inaccuracies registered by Perry-Camp: Salieri and
Mozart did not use modern conducting techniques; Mozart never misbehaved at the courts
of Colloredo or Joseph II; Leopold did not meet his daughter-in-law for the first time in
Vienna (they first met in Salzburg); Salieri did not commission the Requiem from Mozart,
nor was he present at Mozart's death; Mozart did not drink himself to death, nor was there
a rainstorm on the day of his funeral; etc.
4. Perry-Camp, 119.
5. Perry-Camp, 118.
6. Mark Ringer, "Amadeus: From Play to Film," Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (Oct. 1984):
120.
7. Michiko Kakutani, "How 'Amadeus' Was Translated from Play to Film," New York
Times, 16 Sept. 1984, quotes Peter Shaffer as follows: The movie "has become much more
a celebration of the music. . . . In the film . . . music almost becomes a character, the most
important character." In a Times article of his own, "Paying Homage to Mozart" (New York
Times, 2 Sept. 1984), Shaffer wrote: "In the picture, the music naturally became more
prominent than in the play. . . . the cinema positively welcomes music in floods—and, of
course, acoustical inundation is very much the fate of drowning Salieri. Music, sublime
and unstaunchable, pouring in a stream over a gasping man's head, is of course the central
subject of the film" (emphasis in original).

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