With Pushkin as his inspiration, Peter Shaffer took this grisly anecdote as a starting point for what Simon Callow – the actor who first played Mozart on stage – describes as “a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent”. The play was later set as an opera by the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and has continued to grip the artistic imagination ever since. It was Alexander Pushkin who first seized on the idea that the alleged rivalry between these two Vienna-based composers might make good drama: in 1830 he published a short play called Mozart and Salieri, in which the latter murders the former onstage. She describes it as “laughably” wrong – “a deadly rivalry that never was, a dried-up bachelor who was actually a father of eight, and flops that were hits in reality” – and reckons nothing about the film can redeem “the fact that the entire premise – that Salieri loathed Mozart and plotted his demise – is probably not true”.
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Alex von Tunzelmann, writing in the Guardian, is one of the many historians frustrated by the glittering success of a film that is so inaccurate, historically speaking.
#AMADEUS PLAY MOVIE#
Arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity, it has taken its place in motion picture history and is invariably described as a masterpiece.Īll this is despite the fact the film plays shamelessly fast and loose with historical fact, taking as its basis a supposedly bitter rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his counterpart Antonio Salieri, court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, that may have been nothing more than a vague rumour. Miloš Forman’s 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, took home eight statuettes that night, including best film, best director, best actor and best adapted screenplay. Hulce plays Mozart as a wild, foul-mouthed, joyously smutty boy - hot for his stacked, doll-faced wife, Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) - while the ugly, jealous Salieri watches, silent and seething.It is 30 years since Amadeus swept the board at the Academy Awards.
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Yet "Amadeus," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1984 (and seven others), stood apart even then from its own trivial, youth-obsessed decade - even though it suggests those very same teen-sex comedies in the surprise casting as Mozart of Hulce, one of the "Animal House" boy-os.
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As we watch "Amadeus" now, it seems doubly the product of a vanished age: not just the early 19th Century, but a different movie era. The movie is shot in Czechoslovakia, in palaces and ancient streets, and the gorgeous music flooding the sound track is conducted by prime Mozartean Neville Marriner. It's also a portrait of the conflict between artistic genius - wild, profligate and doomed - and mediocrity: a celebration of musical genius as a divine gift. Shaffer's play is based semi-loosely on the facts of Mozart's life - his latter-day poverty and the parallel success of Salieri (who, in old age, allegedly confessed twice to poisoning his rival).
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"Amadeus -The Director's Cut" extends by 20 minutesMilos Forman's exuberant, shattering film from Peter Shaffer's play on the tragic career of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (played by Tom Hulce) and the contrasting fame - and later guilt-ridden obscurity - of his less-talented colleague, Antonio Salieri (F.