Writers as far back as the 19th century had been inspired by the legendary rivalry between Antonio Salieri, Court Composer of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the phenomenal prodigy who stormed into the court at Vienna and showed up Salieri for the comparative mediocrity that he was. Alexander Pushkin had adapted the story as a play in 1830; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as an opera in 1897. And then, most famously and lastingly, there was the stage play, Amadeus, written by Peter Shaffer, which took London and then Broadway by storm in 1979 and 1981, respectively.
In short order, Shaffer adapted Amadeus into a screenplay, which was directed by the Czech master Milos Forman. This version, too, was a sensation, winning eight Oscars and widespread acclaim. F. Murray Abraham won the Oscar for his transcendently saturnine Salieri; Tom Hulce’s inanely giggling, faunlike Mozart is just as good, though not as well-remembered today, perhaps because Hulce largely retired from acting decades ago.
This lush, spectacular film was regarded as one of the greatest ever made when it was first released, yet it’s not as talked about or fully appreciated as some of its other 1984 brethren like Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, or even Gremlins. However, its influence is still seen and felt today in both obvious imitators (Oppenheimer) and unlikely admirers (WandaVision). Amadeus is a movie with curiously invisible cultural impact, but one that keeps inspiring and influencing big blockbusters, Oscar-winning movies, and small-screen triumphs.
A tall tale worth telling (and borrowing)
In the 40 years since its release on September 19th, 1984, the story of Amadeus — filled with triumphal music, torturous jealousy, shattered faith, and a twisted religious crusade — has never really left us. Inspiring filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, in genres as widespread as fantasy, science fiction, and historical drama, from Oscar bait to the Marvel Universe, Amadeus has a paradigmatic structure that still enthralls. One man, sincere, dedicated to his art, nominally well-behaved, strives all his life to be a great artist, and achieves with his study only the knowledge that he will never ultimately measure up. Another man, less substantial, more stylish, achieves transcendent greatness without really trying. And God, in a way, is indicted for it.
That the story is not remotely historically true is not really the point. Salieri, revisionist musical historians have contended, was a better composer than Shaffer had him cracked up to be; the supposed rivalry between the Italian and the Austrian composer is completely undocumented.
In fact, Salieri later taught Mozart’s son piano – hardly a thing one does for one’s mortal enemy. Still, there were rumors as early as the time of Mozart’s death, in 1791, that Salieri had poisoned him – malicious falsehoods that ultimately drove Salieri to a nervous breakdown. But nonetheless, the dichotomy of the man who works hard for a middling grade and the man who finds his way to genius as if by accident was intriguing even at the time. The question is why – and what gives it the staying power that echoes through film and TV history even up until today?
The rivalry continues in Oppenheimer
Shaffer’s concern was artists, or at least the artistically minded. In his 1973 play Equus, a child psychiatrist obsessed with the ancient world bemoans the lesser gods and aesthetic pursuits of modernity. In his 1990 play Lettice and Lovage, a woman who gives tours of old Tudor mansions plans to bomb a Brutalist concrete monstrosity in London. By contrast, the filmmaker Christopher Nolan, whose background parallels Shaffer in some important ways (not least that they both spent their youths moving fairly freely between the U.S. and the U.K.), is more interested in scientists, adventurers, and generally more muscular, less contemplative figures. But the same premises hold.
Nolan has been open about the influence of Amadeus on Oppenheimer, his 2023 Best Picture winner, which frames the story of the eponymous atomic pioneer as a rivalry between Oppenheimer himself and his patron-turned-persecutor, Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission. In the film, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) first meet in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1947; Strauss is at the time a board member of the Institute for Advanced Study, placing him in a scientific milieu and thus metaphorically contending with Oppenheimer on the latter’s “own turf.”
Oppenheimer assumes that an academic figurehead like Strauss must have some knowledge of science. He asks: “You’re a physicist by training, Mr. Strauss?” Strauss demurs, but Oppenheimer keeps pushing, “You never thought of studying physics formally?” Strauss replies, “I had offers. But I chose to sell shoes.” Oppenheimer lets a grin (or something close to it – does Murphy ever grin?) spread across his face.
Oppenheimer: Science as art and genius as fait accompli
Throughout the film, Strauss is posited as malignantly envious of Oppenheimer’s scientific acumen, a man positioned on the edges of serious science who is nonetheless unequipped to engage with it in a serious way. Strauss’ regard for Einstein, which Oppenheimer dismisses, his attempt to prevent the export of atomic isotopes, which Oppenheimer ridicules in front of a Congressional panel – these things signify the attempts of a smart and driven man attempting to muscle in on a field for which he is simply not granted godlike gifts, as Oppenheimer is.
The distinction between geniuses and strivers is perennial in Hollywood movies (see most of the films of Brad Bird). The suggestion is that some of us are simply special, and others are not, and that however hard those of us in the “not” category might try to measure up, the best thing to do is simply to get out of the way and let geniuses genius, so to speak.
Oppenheimer attempts to be a measured portrait of its central character, acknowledging – if briefly – the moral inconsistencies that made him complicit in developing the most destructive weapon in the history of the world. But ultimately, whatever the consequences of his work, it lionizes him for being self-evidently brilliant, and condemns Strauss for being, well, not.
Nolan has been influenced by Amadeus since The Prestige
Oppenheimer isn’t the only Nolan film to operate along Shafferian lines. In The Prestige (2006), Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier and Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden are rival 19th-century magicians in a similar mold. The working-class Borden has devised an ingenious trick he calls The Transported Man, in which he appears to teleport himself across a room; the patrician Angier becomes obsessed with discovering how Borden achieves the seemingly impossible effect in order to steal it for himself.
In a steampunk twist, the desperate Angier contracts Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) to build him a machine that creates exact duplicates of human beings – every time the trick is performed, the original Angier is dropped into a water tank and drowned, and the clone continues Angier’s life. Borden, meanwhile, turns out to have simply been a pair of identical twins all along – a pedestrian but ultimately self-evident revelation.
Angier’s resorting to a kind of technological “god” – capable of powers men of his time feared in the same way they did the supernatural – directly parallels Salieri’s journey in Amadeus, as pointed out by the Observer’s film critic Philip French at the time of The Prestige’s release. Salieri, a devout Catholic, makes a deal with God as a child, offering him spiritual purity in exchange for musical excellence. Discovering in his adulthood that, as he sees it, God has “chosen for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy” (Mozart), he goes from negotiating with God to warring with him, vowing to “hinder and harm Your creature as far as I am able.” Bowie’s flighty Tesla functions as Angier’s “God” figure in this construction.
Amadeus’ influence on the MCU
Kathryn Hahn has made a career of unexpected intensity. Her upcoming reprisal of the role of Agatha Harkness, a reality-distorting witch, in Disney +’s Agatha All Along will no doubt be as effective as, if somewhat less surprising than, her debut as the character in the miniseries WandaVision (2021). From the beginning, Hahn has framed Harkness’ rivalry with Marvel antihero Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) in the context of Amadeus.
In a 2021 interview with the New York Times, she told Dave Itzkoff, “We talked a lot about Amadeus and Salieri, in terms of their relationship — Agatha wishes that she could make the kind of music that the Scarlet Witch just had naturally. For someone that has spent centuries studying this, to meet a young person to whom it comes completely naturally, it’s maddening and you want to know why.”
WandaVision holds its cards close to its vest, disguising Agatha as “Agnes,” the daffy next-door neighbor in a series of augmented realities based on television sitcoms ostensibly being projected/created by Scarlet Witch. Mozart, in Amadeus, also sees Salieri as being a friend, or at least harmless, to begin with.
But by contrast, Salieri conducts his whispering campaign against Mozart in the musical circles of Vienna (“messing up everything,” as Agatha might put it) behind Mozart’s back. Since the film’s perspective lies with Salieri, it doesn’t have the luxury of hiding that from the audience. Even the sequence in which Salieri appears in Carnival mask and disguise to commission the Requiem that ultimately, Darkhold-like, drains the life and power from Mozart, it’s transparent to the audience that we’re dealing with a familiar figure.
Mozart and Salieri aligned
But perhaps Scarlet Witch’s ultimate turn to the dark side, in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), is the forerunner of a future alignment between Scarlet Witch and Agatha, a chance for Agatha to gain proximity to some of that “completely natural” energy and to benefit, at least somewhat, from the experience. This eventuality, after all, is the bright spot in the otherwise pitch-black Amadeus – and the scene that makes the film.
Hulce’s Mozart, occupied simultaneously with the composition of The Magic Flute and the Requiem (fictionally) commissioned by Salieri, suffering the effects of unbridled alcoholism and dissipation, and abandoned by his wife and child, finally collapses while conducting. Salieri, unable to keep from idolizing this “instrument of God,” takes him home and cares for him, even as he secretly plots to claim to have written the Requiem himself after Mozart dies. In a breathtaking display of collaborative acting by Hulce and Abraham, Salieri acts as transcriber for the ongoing Requiem as Mozart dictates from his deathbed.
Salieri’s pen struggles to keep up with Mozart’s explosive brilliance — “You go too fast,” he murmurs breathlessly, “you go too fast!” But as the score to this unfinished masterpiece swells under the scene, Salieri begins to see what Mozart is going for, and is, unavoidably, infected with the joy of composition — “That’s wonderful!” For a moment, he, too, is part of the work of genius. For a moment, he is singing with the voice of God.
And Mozart collapses, spent, onto his pillow. “I’m so ashamed,” he breathes. “I was foolish. I thought you did not care for my work – or me. Forgive me. Forgive me!”
And it is this impossible forgiveness, this impossible unity, the transhumanist wonder of creation, that lead us to envy and analyze creative facility with such heedless abandon. It’s this forgiveness – the benediction of the genius – which we seek when we return to Amadeus, again and again.
Amadeus is available to rent or purchase from Amazon Prime Video and other major digital vendors.
