Last night, we went
out to watch the spring revival of ’Amadeus’ at the City Lights Theater in San
Jose. The play by Peter Shaffer won a Tony Award and received eight Oscars as a
motion picture, including Best Picture. This post is not a critical essay on
the production, but the emotional journey I had with the characters during the
play.
The first scene opens at the salon of Antonio Salieri with
his appeal:
Mozart! Mozart!
Forgive me!
Forgive your
assassin!
While ominous whispers accuse in repetition, ’Salieri,
Salieri’. We doubt that the man is
paranoiac and imagining voices. His feverish pitch mellows to a confessional
tone when he confides to the audience:
I was the most
successful musician in Vienna.
And the happiest.
Till he came. Mozart.
And we realize immediately, this is not going to be a hymn
of joy, but a tragic symphony of dark emotions that we fear in ourselves.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born to Leopold Mozart and Anna
Maria, in Salzburg in the 18th century when Austria was still under the Holy
Roman Empire. He performed as a child prodigy in the presence of royalties,
while Salieri was born to a merchant who wanted him to be interested in
commerce. He admits to be jealous of the
fact that Mozart’s father encouraged his prodigious talent.
You can’t blame old
Salieri when he gets nostalgic about his last days in Lombardy, Italy before he
had set out for Vienna, Austria to study music and reminisces the proud prayer
he had offered in the church:
Lord, make me a great
composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music –
And be celebrated
myself! Make me famous through the world.
Make me immortal!
After I die let people speak my name forever
With love for what I
wrote! In return I vow I will give you my chastity –
My industry, my deepest
humility, every hour of my life.
And I will help my
fellow man all I can. Amen and amen!
For some time, at least, God was with him. Within a few
years of reaching Vienna, he became the Court Composer to Emperor Joseph II. In
those days, musicians had to rely on sponsors and patronage. This also allowed
a certain amount of censorship because most of them would be then obliged to
cater to the fancies of the nobles. Who would want to write about the common
man? The heroes would be Gods and their stories would be epics. Who would
bother about the banalities of daily lives?
Consider meeting the man who had written his first concerto
at the age of four, his first symphony at seven and a full-scale opera at
twelve. What had Salieri imagined him to be like? Measured? Poised? Controlled?
Mozart was polarly opposite to his expectations. While he sat unnoticed in the
buffet room of the palace, savoring his favorite- Crema al Mascarpone (‘We all
have patriotic feelings of some kind’, he justified), Salieri heard giggles and
then saw Mozart chase Constanze, his fiancée. He dropped to all fours and
crawled across the floor, meowing and hissing like a cat:
Meow! Meow!
Puss-wuss,
fangs-wangs. Paws-claws.
Maybe Salieri wasn’t supposed to witness this secret of
their conjugal bliss- the occasional teasing and nonsensical laughter. To
Salieri it was infantile, crude, and antithetical to his assumptions about a
genius. With consecutive meetings, his rage surged with Mozart’s slighting of
the Italian opera. He also inadvertently eavesdropped on a conversation between
Mozart and Constanze where she accused him of fooling around with Katherina
Cavielri, a young soprano and one of Salieri’s students, in fact, his favorite.
Salieri had admitted that his wife was cold, lacking in passion,’ La statua’,
yet he had chosen a life of virtue because he had promised to. But Mozart said
to Constanze that the only reason Katherina was virtuous under the tutelage of
Salieri was because he couldn’t ‘get it up’. Insulted, blinded with rage and
jealousy, Salieri declared to God:
From now on, we are
enemies, You and I!
Because You will not
enter me, with all my need for you;
Because You scorn my
attempts at virtue;
Because You choose
for Your instrument a
Boastful, lustful,
smutty infantile boy and give me for reward only the
Ability to recognize
the Incarnation;
Because You are
unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You! I swear it!
I will hinder and
harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. I will ruin Your Incarnation.
Thus began Salieri’s elaborate schemes to curb the genius of
Mozart. Mozart’s expenditures were more than his earnings, and he desperately
needed an official post at the court. The niece of the emperor, Princess
Elizabeth needed a tutor, and Salieri promised Mozart that he would recommend
him for it. In reality, he put forth a less talented musician for the job, who
Mozart feared would do more musical harm to the princess.
The most confounding thing of all was that
Mozart did not, for a second, doubt Salieri’s true intentions. In fact, he
considered him a friend. He confided in him that he was broke, his concerts
didn’t pay much and the only way to earn was if he could have pupils. Salieri offered false promises of help, and
when Mozart resorted to begging from his Mason brothers, Salieri made sure it
was stopped when he advised Mozart to write about the secret order, as a mark
of gratitude. But when the opera ‘The Magic Flute’ disclosed a Masonic
initiation and other rites, the order was offended and it resulted in Mozart’s
suspension from the brotherhood.
Mozart, now destitute and nearing his end of days, had lost
much of his mental faculties. Salieri hoped to see him reduced to nothing, and
one a night when his curiosity got the better of him, he chose to walk in the
direction of Mozart’s home. But Mozart’s circumstances had not begrimed his
genius. He was composing ‘Requiem’ at what he alleged was to serve the request
of a hooded figure that beckoned him grimly in his dreams. The figure was actually a disguised servant of a certain gentleman who
wanted to pass ‘Requiem’ as his own composition to Count Franz, who had lost his wife and wanted
to commission a piece in her commemoration.
When Salieri witnessed the filth and decay in Mozart’s life
and realized that much of it was his own doing, he made a last attempt to
redeem himself and confessed. Mozart was not able to comprehend fully and
Salieri was too late with his explanation. At that moment, you couldn’t decide which
was more pitiful- Salieri’s jealousy gnawing into his heart all those years or
his need for absolution from Mozart.
You might be interested to know that though Mozart died in
poverty and was buried in a common grave, the elite of Vienna provided for his
wife and children. She also sold his original manuscripts, charging ‘by the
ink’, and married diplomat Georg Nikolaus (who later wrote a biography on
Mozart).
In the final act, we are brought back to old Salieri’s
salon. Nearing dawn, he announces:
From now on no one
will be able to speak of Mozart
Without thinking of
me. Whenever they say Mozart with love,
They’ll have to say
Salieri with loathing.
And that's my
immortality - at last! Our names will be tied together for eternity -
His in fame and mine
in infamy. At least it's better than the total oblivion he'd planned for me,
your merciful God!
Facing the audience now, he chants:
Mediocrities
everywhere,
Now and to come: I
absolve you all!
Amen! Amen! Amen!
***
I did not view the play as a lesson in history, nor do I
want to judge the veracity of Salieri’s moral dilemma or Mozart’s
puerility. But as a pure creative piece,
it has its brilliance in the eternality of characters within their temporal
span of existence. At moments, you find yourself identifying with Salieri, a
hard-working artist who feels cheated by his creator when he witnesses the easy
genius of another man, whom he considers the conduit of God Himself. His music
so divine, so perfect! There was no murder except of the young Salieri who had
promised his virtue to God. And we find ourselves weeping for that loss.
